Each year now, at the stroke of midnight when Halloween is officially over, Mariah Carey has been doing her annual high-pitched announcement proclaiming that it’s time for Christmas. And each year, I watch it out of a sense of morbid curiosity—just to see how the megahit is looking like as it pulls out of the station for another run at the charts. I find it mildly amusing, but in the end I can’t get behind the idea of Christmas observance starting on the first of November. I know it’s not so much a thing in most parts of the United States of America, but at least give All Saint’s Day its own space for pause and reflection. And then maybe a week or two after, allow the red, green, and sparkly holiday cheer to sprout up all around us.
Now it’s November 30th, and in a few hours, the clock is going to strike midnight and we’re into December. Right now I can’t decide if I’m greeting this Christian holiday megamonth with relief or a bit of anxiety. I say this because November has been jam-packed with attempts to front load all of the year-end tasks: I have mailed off 12 bottles of wine, 3 panettone, untold bags of chocolate hazelnut chocolates, boxes of pocket coffee, and one gluten-free pandoro to addresses in Europe, Africa and North America. Combine that with the onslaught of work tasks coming at me (my first Commanding Officer described it as, “up to my neck in alligators!”) …and I am fairly optimistic that mid-December will come and I’ll be sitting back in New England watching crazy hockey games (like this one) and wondering what all the fuss was about. I guess we’ll see.
While I do find being an adult to be an exhausting activity, in the end I ultimately look forward to the holiday season. In fact, I just put on one of my favorite Christmas tunes to drown out a motorist who is absolutely leaning on his or her car horn just outside my house. I don’t even need to open the window to understand that some other Roman human has double parked their car like it is their God-given right to do it (à la, “I’m just popping in for a minute…that city bus can wait!”). Bad driving is celebrated all twelve months out of the year, but Mariah Carey has signaled to me that right now is the time to make it a little more festive.
I have been unconsciously building this cartoon in my head that perfectly encapsulates my existence as an aging human. The closest real-life approximation that I have found comes from this Italian film where Fantozzi is trying to catch a bus in order to make his commute to work. In a really amazing scene, the cluster of folks trying to get to work are pulled out of the packed city bus and are unceremoniously strewn onto the street. Despite their desperate attempts to stay aboard. Everyone ultimately tumbles into the street along with their possessions: purses, pieces of fruit. And because the world is as it is, the bus just keeps on going—treating these tired, middle-aged people like the pawns that they are.
In my cartoon, I exist in that same kind of harried state, but I haven’t been spit out of the bus. I’m clinging to the rear bumper of the moving bus while also holding a bag of crap that is not packaged well and is threatening to spill out onto the street. But I need to keep a hold of it all and get to where I need to go. Somehow, along the way, more things are handed to me that need to be tended to. There seems to be no way that I can realistically pull it all off: staying latched to the bus, keeping all of my belongings on my person, while also accepting more crap to carry … .but somehow, I am just barely pulling it off. That, my friends, is my definition of adult existence. We’re human cartoons going about our absurd lives of (often) needless complication.
But it’s the holiday season! Things might still be far from perfectly balanced, but we all kind of accept that the mess that we create can be rendered a bit more beautiful if we string up lights. Install a tree, or yes, overexert oneself by spending probably way too much money to ship packages of smiles to friends and family far and near. Without these life breaks heralded by the likes of Mariah Carey, I tend to think that I would have let go of that bus’s bumper many years ago.
Even though it’s still a fair number of days away, I’ve got my suitcase open on the floor and right now, it is filled and overflowing. Not with a single stitch of clothes, but instead more Italian confections that I plan to haul home. In the end, I think I might have bought too much to gift to all of the old friends who I might encounter back in America—but I’d rather have it that way. I’d rather be holding a bag overflowing with stuff rather than going through life empty-handed. And so with that in mind, I’m looking forward to this next fast-and-approaching round of travel Olympics. To get home with everything intact, and then taking delight in the brightest parts of the adult messiness. Gifting each thing and having it accompanied by a big hug. Only then will I know that I’m really into the holiday season.