During every Christmas season, I find myself barren of "spirit," though full of other commendable traits, an observation one invariably makes about me at this time, and which my fellow curmudgeons must suffer too, I imagine. Although, as unkind criticism goes, this one makes me feel that I'm doing something right when I receive it.
"To lack Christmas spirit" is a polite euphemism tossed around during the holidays that generally means, "You're being a depressed ass, and no one wants to make Christmas cookies with you." To be entitled to such a description, one has only to reject, criticize, or abstain from any of a variety of holiday norms and obligations, like writing Christmas cards, listening to carols, wearing red and green sweaters with snowflake patterns, shopping for gifts in crowded malls, decorating your entire house with lights and tinsel, and making Christmas cookies.
Adolescents and old men are the usual victims of Christmas spirit deficiency, but iconoclasts of all ages turn their resistance into an art. How does one properly enjoy the Christmas season? One can either mope, grumbling maledictions upon receiving holiday wishes, or make every day a prelude to the grand festival of Saturnalia, in honor of the Western world's pagan origins. The latter, by the way, is a terrific gesture of respect for cultural and religious diversity.
The accusation that one lacks Christmas spirit, often wantonly hurled at so-called curmodgeons, is as incomprehensible to me as the concept of Christmas spirit itself. Does the moral zeitgeist suddenly change after Thanksgiving? Must we all succumb to the cheerful new ether that wafts over us from the North Pole, only to dissipate the day after Christmas? What is so intolerable about this season is not only the cheerfulness that pervades everything; after all, that is only a thin and transparent covering. Rather, it is the cynicism that belies the cheerfulness, and the pressure to conform to it.
If I decry the conversion of Christmas into a commodity, if I criticize the vast orchestration of lights and ornaments in every city and neighborhood, if I cringe at the continuous stream of carols on the radio, and in general, the transient euphoria of holiday cheer, it is not because I am mean-spirited. What was once, in the mists of a pre-Christian past, a season hallowed, has long since been ground into something positively hollow, and I wish it weren't so.
This Christmas cum Saturnalia, resist the urge to call anyone a grinch. It may be undeserved. That poor wight may in fact be gazing into those sacred mists.
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