HOLIDAY SMACKDOWN

Change is bad.

Or that’s what my zebra finches used to say. I mean, with their bodies. I don’t generally full-on hallucinate birds talking to me. Anyway, I propose that at the holidays it is necessary to be less zebra finch and more conure (into absolutely everything, all the time, at all costs, avec sharp and effective mouth parts).

Jim the Conure, here preparing to do IT work.

What are the holidays, anyway, other than a WWF smackdown between What Has Been and What Will Be? A real nasty hair-pulling brawl between What You’re Supposed to Do and What You End Up Doing?

The trick, in my estimation, is to feel less like a Failure at the resulting mosh-pit of cross-purposes and instead feel more… let’s say… crowingly triumphant. Psychotic rooster style, eyes bugging out and tail feathers a-quiver.

The children who refuse to eat the Christmas Ham, insisting instead on boxed mac and cheese? Brilliant! All that time you spent cooking the second pan of noodles had you squeezed between your sister and some cousins at the stove, and some pretty salty jokes about parenting were made and solidarity was had!

The child who eats Nothing But Christmas Ham, and has a meltdown at caroling time when he is not allowed throw the yoga ball he found at the Christmas tree to demonstrate his strength and superior silliness? Perfect! You have several minutes of fallout in which there exists audible proof for all relatives of why you are so exhausted all the time.

The fever one of your children spikes out of nowhere on xmas day? Bingo, at least one parent’s now got a first-class ticket to cuddle-ville, and the necessary reduction in the planned driving schedule for the day is just significant enough to afford a few truly miraculous hours of Doing Nothing, which, friends, HAVE YOU TRIED THIS? HOLY SMOKES ITS GOOD SHIT.

Both parents’ main presents for each other falling outside the planned window of presentation (one given early for necessity purposes and one arriving late in service of general postal foolery)? No problem! Guess what? Turns out you actually, factually, really and truly love getting socks and candles and a book. And soda charger cartridges you needed anyway. Like, sometimes modesty is the very sexiest thing: take away the nipple tassles and cover the day instead in the soft, sturdy fabric of small and quiet enjoyments, and check it out, excitement can basically go sit on it and spin, cause you’ve got some serious blobbing around squinting at chapter one to do (since you can’t find your glasses, you oldening, happy book-hag).

The kid who wakes the during the night before Christmas at 2am (and 3:30am, and 4:45am) and shouts as loudly and abruptly as is humanly possible to his sister about the presents he’s just peered at by craning around the stairway landing bravely in the dark? Fantastic! You haven’t practiced your board-body zombie-catapult-launch from your bed (the one where you’re upright and stiffly running before your eyes are open) since the kids were three or four! The adrenally fueled heartbeats gleaned from this fiasco surely count towards some kind of exercise.

And the improvisation skills!— the ones you reach deep into the belly of your still-warm half-sleep for and yank out by the scruff— these come up writhing, potent: “We CANT go down there,” you say, with magical assuredness, hearing your own breath spooling out words even as you marvel that you have breath at all, from inside the still-blessed alienation of sleep.

“Even though SOME presents are out, yes— THOSE are just the ones Mama and Daddy put out, and if we go down now, we might SCARE the magic of Santa AWAY! The ONLY time Santa’s magic can work is while you are ASLEEP!” you say — whereupon the shouting child stops shouting, and slithers up the ladder to his bunk so fast that his naked butt-cheeks paint with their luminosity a kind of comet-smudge across the dim of the now-quiet room.

successfully defended until 5:40am

I suppose the point is that we need both the pattern and its violation.

If the holidays were all pattern, nothing but adherence to the Intended Plan for Happenings… well that would probably kind of suck.

(Whether that pattern’s layout be derived from the larger culture’s suggestion [of a cloying, money-hemorrhaging, half-headed, daftly smiling / miraculously dentally perfect “togetherness”] or your family’s particular blueprint for its own brand of joy [insert whatever traditions, orthodontic and behavioral irregularities, traumas and neuroses stoke the flames of your genetic pool’s choices of group repetition here], or both.)

It’s in/by the Deviations from the Plan

Deviations from the Plan

…that I can fully appreciate its gifts. And, I’d say, also the deviations themselves.

I’d be far less able to see the richness of either state of affairs (The Plan or its Wreckage) if these two weren’t having a gaudy, corndog-worthy wrestling match.

Tradition can’t be tradition unless the world around it is trying to change, and change can’t be transformative unless it plants its feet in the grounds it came from, and issues, like my children, a powerful heel-shove into the kidneys of their prone and exhausted mother (The Past) in order to gather itself for the heave-ho into the not-yet-known.

Riding the tension between these two— the Planned/Wished-for and the Surprising/Actual Goddamned Reality— is, I’ve come to believe, actually the best way to get my groove on. The two harmonize, so that we get a rising chorus of voices rather than just a tidy solo line.

The solo can be gorgeous, really, and has its place, for sure. But I have to be honest: it doesn’t—and it can’t— move me the in the same way the sound of many voices together always, always does.

Video credit: Margaret Manring