christmas blues I

christmas is a deeply personal family time and lots of families are severely dysfunctional, so it's not easy to talk about. it reminds me that my own family was relatively healthy in that regard and when i try to remember what was good, what worked, i sometimes hope to just recreate that, but it never works. in recent times christmas has been a time of bitter disappointment, sometimes even violent bitter disappointment. what went wrong?

an obvious culprit is blatant materialism and entitlement, but even that doesn't really explain everything. everyone in the family is far more focused on material goods than i am, which means that when my wife sends me out shopping they are invariably disappointed in what i bring home. my wife has evolved into just telling me exxactly what she wants me to bring home, since i'm better at actually driving, parking, braving the mobs, and walking back out with something. ok so that relieves the actual responsibility on my part of actually picking something out for someone which obviously i'm quite bad at anyway. but i come around to one more year and this time we have two new girls, eight and nine, who have never experienced a christmas with us. we have two seventeen-year-olds, one of whom has been around for years and is walking on clouds again hoping for the perfect material-drop that will make her life just perfect again. the other is a foster kid who, like his two sisters, will probably be overjoyed at whatever is given to him and in fact his life has been considerably improved materially by his removal from his parents and his placement here where there just seems to be money to get what he needs. to his credit, he doesn't just grab what he needs like some of the others, and doesn't seem to be as blatantly materialistic as our kids. so i can't blame the entire generation and i don't.

in a way i'll do what i always have done, which is to not worry so much about the stuff, and let them be disappointed if that's the way they're inclined to be. you can tell that i've kind of withdrawn from that aspect of it, blaming my wife or them for being so focused on something that doesn't make them happy anyway, and just let the chips fall where they may. it seems that no matter how much we spend on an uninterrupted flow of stuff, it's still a bitter and dangerous time of year and i might as well just back off, do what makes me happy, retreat into my own shell.

but wait, with three new people, i could reestablish the old customs that i used to enjoy, that make it a family time, that in a way take precedence over everyone waiting for what one of us got from amazon or walmart. but this year following my surgery i got sick and have been barely able to get up out of my chair and produce what i need to. one thing we always did was luminaria - this year, no luminaria, i forgot, and then it got all drizzly and foggy anyway. the luminaria probably would have worked, though the drizzle was off and on all night, but by the time i thought of it i was way too tired. also there's the trains. a lot of work, but if you clear out the table in the garage, there's enough room to set up trains and it can be really fun. it's a christmastime thing. another new year tradition is watching back to the future, one two or three, or all three, or just the third one, which is our favorite even if it may not be the best. we don't watch movies anymore thouugh, not together anyway, and nowadays i have almost no patience with just sitting down and watching any movie with anyone, we don't have a couch, so kids who want to watch a movie shut their bedroom door, get in bed, and then turn it on and sit there for a few hours. not me. my hearing is too bad anyway, and i find it too upsetting that this kind of thing has become what our life is reduced to.

i got the girls a "barbie monopoly" game. i figured you might as well combine the two most garish symbols of commercailism and materialism, put them all in one place, and let them concentrate on the lessons that any monopoly game will provide: namely that one person will get rich, another will get crushed, it's all about money, and all that glitter and nice names and apparent wealth and luxury just looks shiny and unavailable to the vast majority of us who are schlubbing away working some routine job. i don't care, in the end i'm not going to let my happiness be derived from having something others don't, or from having something i didn't work for, or even from having something period. i eat, i live, i write. i don't consume much. i don't own much, i don't want it. i'm not sure my kids can even see that.

no note for santa this year. my wife asked if she should bring the girls downstairs, make a plate of cookies, and have them write a note telling santa that they've been good. in return santa writes them a note that says indeed they've been good, enjoy. lost my spirit this year. it's a charade i'd been losing patience with anyway. i didn't sign the note santa, but rather just put ho ho ho, and began to concentrate on trying to tell the truth in such a way that it was relatively obvious that everything came from us, the parents, and that there wasn't some clown stuffing himself down through the chimney to fill the place with fancy electronics from amazon. what i'm feeling is more a barely concealed contempt for the whole process, wanting stuff, getting stuff, pretending that someone somehow deserves it. they're not especailly bad kids, in fact, they're lucky they just got placed in some place that can deliver to them, if ultimately they learn how to verbalize what they want, can deliver whatever they want. the money is not so much a problem, the state will provide it, all we have to do is convert it into whatever works for them or whatever they want. obviously i'm letting wife handle that so the question is, what to say to her so this doesn't get converted into blatant materialism, cruel disappointment, even violent threats over some mal-distribution of the goods. the girls may only be with us this one year. but it's become a matter of principle. how do you hand out tons of stuff and not turn kids into material-focused kids?

let's look at the other side, to help give me perspective, i always do this just to get the incentive to actually go out and do what i have to do. and that's slipping, obviously. but the other argument is that presents represent your love for them so when you go out and turn that love into money and then stuff you are proving that you love them in a very direct, materialist, tangible way, unlike say just spending time with them or teaching them how to tie their shoe or drive. you're saying this vlogging camera represents our love for you so don't go saying that we don't love you or don't give you whatever you want. now my daughter, whose mother rejected me many years ago, is very much a part of her mother's family which also is entirely materialistic and subscribes to that general theory. you have to get a good present for every member of the family and this is an obligation you start working on in october and of course making, having and producing the money necessary to keep this system running is a major part of life and of course you're amply rewarded for your hard work by receiving all kinds of things from various corners of the extended family. i can't actually speak for whether this makes them happy; it certainly makes their christmas a huge materialist splash, with wrapping paper very visibly all over their floor. but she's glad to visit me partly because i'm just not in that world. and she couldn't manage two families anyway.

people are awake. got to go. it may be a choorb, as my yiddish relatives would say, but it's my choorb, and i have to tend to it.