CUDDLY AS A CACTUS

your yearly holiday SOS

**Do not read this if you are jingling, candle-glowing, or feeling warm & content. This cock-

tail party is not for you.

Sorry about the line-break. I did it because I wanted to.

In my defense, I sprained my ankle on the day I was to run my first 10k in six months because I finally had the health and fitness to do it.

Also:

—my SI joint is all forked up and I have to be careful leaning over, running, walking, breathing, and blinking,

—I’ve been hacking up my gizzard for three months,

—my son is on antibiotics —> needs an exorcism,

—my neck is too stiff to look left and up at the same time (I can choose one),

—I get Reynaud’s trying to open the car door when it’s below 70F,

—my doctor’s office’s anointed bureaucratic staff performed a lightning-round spastic holiday audit in which they deleted the three refills on my life-saving blood-thinners from the pharmacy records without informing me, on a Friday when I was due for a refill,

—and there is a mouse in my kitchen we can’t seem to trap who’s grown so bold now he walks by me and says “WTF are you looking at” and at this point I just kind of apologize and look away so he doesn’t mug me.

If you are in the Mugged by Mice club this season, hop on this bus. Let’s make it one of those peddle-crafts with a bar inside that bachelor parties full of young entitled men ride through cities to show off their calves and chugging ability. We’re going to showcase all our lowest-brow skills here.

I’ve talked to several (ridiculously compassionate, smart, tenacious) people who have pronounced themselves DONE with this year, heavy of heart, weary and despairing of the work before them, underfed by the short daylight and the perpetual absence of the Village— you know, the one we actually evolved to live within, the ghost of which we hear, always, calling, just past the winds of suburbia, single-occupant car rides, solo parenting, pressurized and isolated nuclear-family setups, and the soul-crush of capitalism.*

*As Elena Bridgers puts it, in her substack which I always always find insightful and comforting and deeply sensible, with its evolutionary-anthropological framing:

Whenever I dig into the hunter-gatherer literature or immerse myself in the research on what [life] was like for 95% of human history, one thing stands out: the incredibly social nature of daily life in these societies. I am quite literally jealous of the social lives of hunter-gatherer mothers. I wish my daily work involved hiking off into the savannah with a group of four of my closest girlfriends and female relatives - baby on my back, toddler happily playing with friends in camp - to go dig tubers and gossip about who is sleeping with whom (the anthropological literature genuinely suggests that this was the preferred topic of conversation among !Kung women).

Although it’s painfully obvious to many people (including therapists, medical professionals, parents of young children, and people with less than a billion dollars) that the holidays can be a really hard and/or downright crummy time, I find that hearing the obvious is often deeply helpful.

So let me say this: it’s OK if you feel down, crummy, listless, lost, angry, sad, alone, resentful, scared, or even childishly contemptuous enough to graffiti your own newsletter with spatial play on the word cocktail.

Here are my six recommendations for the cranky, the fed-up, the strung-out, the low-on-fuel, the struggling-to-hope, the exhausted and displeased and moody and mugged-by-mice:

1. If you have children or someone in the house who likes to “write” inscrutable notes, including muddy pet-prints, place one of these notes, avec glitter, in a less-familiar neighbor’s mailbox, *without explanation*.

   I have heard through the neighborhood grapevine that this particular move, invented by my brilliant daughter, downright delighted one of our older neighborhood members— whom we have never met, know only by hearsay of her last name, and who doesn’t know us, beyond any yank-and-yell procession she might have seen passing on the shoulder of the road in unzipped coats and unruly expressions.

   Plus, I believe the maneuver to be the middle-aged suburban equivalent of this particular piece of brilliance I’ve seen in several corners of the interwebs lately:

   

2. Let traditions slide a bit, and see what slides into their place.

   Call it the Spirit of Mystery. For example, if you generally hang stockings but can’t find them in the Giant Basement Tupperware, try hanging some bold-print undies. You just might get better loot, never know.

   If you forgot to get the dreidel out and don’t feel like crawling around in the attic or your storage unit, try spinning the little playdough “cake” your kid made over the summer which has mummified on the windowsill; maybe it’ll finally break and you won’t have to be the arbiter anymore of when to throw it out.

   Relief is the name of the game here.

3. Be hasty where you generally move like sludge, and slow as as snot in winter where you usually rush.

   For example, if you usually take a long time to choose a Christmas tree, point with the force of Thor and the patience of a boll weevil at the nearest tree and watch impatiently as your spouse cuts it down; then toss it with one stupidly ungloved hand onto the dolly your kid has dragged hopefully into the field and let the 5yo race the thing back to the car before anyone can say they have to pee.

   

   giddyup, wee brawnie

   Conversely, if you usually skip all the slow tracks on an album, try really leaning in to the most maudlin of the recordings, and let your heart ooze with the artist’s very poorest choices. We are all of us allowed to wallow now and then: even Sting, whose xmas album never fails to delight me— and then enrage me with its intermittent bouts of self-absorbed mooing.

4. Celebrate unruliness.

   When you find out, upon getting home, that your Christmas tree has a boner, don’t you dare trim that thing. Give it a butterfly and a portrait. The current of life is strong and not to be tidied.

   

   gloooo-oooo-oooo-ooooo-ria

5. When you write your holiday letter, find a way to include the word “boner.” This is not an exhortation to be ingenuine. Au contraire, mon frere.

6. If you like getting ridiculous holiday letters comprised of disjunctive quotes from 5yos, hmu. I’ve got about ten left and would be so pleased to send to some new folx; my xmas address list feels rather motheaten because

   a) people keep dying (apparently this is what we all do? It’s, like, a normal expected thing, and not a failure of some kind?),

   b) my kids ripped a bunch of pages out (if you usually get one and don’t this year, that’s why),

   c) for some reason I send these things mostly to people I rarely see and who may or may not read them, and have failed in the hundred years since I was eighteen to collect the actual addresses of people who have since become important to me, like the workers at the cheese counter at Wegmans. And you.

Consider this your permission slip to cry or crank around a bit or feel generically uncharitable today. I hereby grant you time and space to yell, resent, blame, whinge, wheedle, moan, and/or buy yourself a wee giftie (we all do it).

Go ahead and recognize the ways in which you’re not getting the fuel or support or nurturance you need. Everyone’s underfed in this more-than-slightly-perverse-and-inhumane society in some way. It’s ok to mourn that— actually, necessary. I think we all have to be sad and/or mad about it first, in some way, before we can really give the full gift of ourselves.

Which we will. We will get there.

But for now: a rant, whiskey in the tea, and the imaginary cocoon of all the absurd things we want but won’t actually be buying. Get your cozy where you can, friends. No one can take your imagination from you.

I am here right now and there’s nothing anyone can do about it

A kind thank you to my readers for any likes, shares, comments, and/or free/paid subscriptions. All of these support my writing which supports my continued participation in society rather than my throwing in the towel and moldering somewhere in the woods alone forever.