Holiday Guilt

I love this time of the year. I really do. It's a time when even the most reluctant of us closet romantics can openly indulge in all those misty sentiments that any other time of the year would be considered corny, unsophisticated, out of place. It's the Holiday Season!

Thanksgiving is for me sort of the official beginning of it all. The smell of turkey somehow signals open season on sentiment. You just know that a mouthful of cranberries and stuffing starts a whole month of good feelings. There are trips to take, parties, great meals, good conversations, reunions with friends and with family. There will be lots of decorations and colored lights.

So what if the music is just a little too loud, a little too insistent in stores, banks, on the radio and TV? Sooner or later, if you listen long enough, you will surely hear that one carol that makes you feel about six years old again. Oh, maybe dad and the kids don't actually go out into woods anymore, and drag home a Christmas tree behind the sleigh and a steamy-breathed horse, like they do on all those cards, but after all, piling into the station wagon for a trip to the super market parking lot isn't all that bad a substltute. And oh yes, that awful long ribbon candy that is impossible to eat, and nobody really likes, but everybody has in a glass dish in the middle of their table.

It's a good time of year, full of good feelings, and right now I am in the midst of my annual resolution not to let the holiday season get to be as mad a rush as it did last year, in hopes of finding a little more time to just sit and savor those feelings.

But, to paraphrase the old saying, to every silver lining there is a cloud. For a fair number of years now there has pretty consistently been another feeling mixed in with all those others, and this one is not very pleasant at all. It's guilt. Everybody knows what guilt feels like, there's really no need to describe it. Everybody knows that guilt can push us to change ourselves and our world, to accomplish some very noble things. But everybody also knows that guilt, more surely than anything else, can also rob us of our ability to enjoy some of the noble things we have already accomplished.

Perhaps guilt isn't precisely the word I want here, but it's pretty close. Maybe embarrassment is more like it. After all, going Christmas shopping can be a pretty unnerving experience. It's all so garish, so put on, so blatantly, painfully commercial. A person begins to wonder just what it is we are preparing to celebrate here, the birth of Christ, or an upswing in the Dow Jones average. Plastic trees, plastic icicles, polyester beards on a Santa Claus who smells more of Seagram than the North Pole. An endless parade of mindless TV specials, taped in July, on a sound stage in California, full of nice, homey family scenes, featuring performers whose deepest experience of family is a card index they use to keep straight which children they had by which wife, and whether or not they have ever been married to the starlet with whom they are singing "Joy to the World." Pre-packaged, electronic emotion, freely sprinkled with plastic snow and loud commercials.

And the gifts! It's simply a fact that what an average family wraps up and puts under the tree this year would feed an entire village in many parts of the world. The toys that a typical child will receive this year are worth more than what many family heads will ever earn in their whole lives.

Well, in the face of all of that, how can anyone claim the right to really enjoy their holidays? Shouldn't we be embarrassed at the phoniness, the commercialism, the greed, the injustice? Shouldn't we feel guilty about the fact that we do it anyway? Because we will. Oh, maybe the turkey will stick in the throat a little bit, but we will eat it. Maybe the ribbon candy will go a little sour in our mouths, but we will still fish it out of that glass bowl, and pop it in. We will still do all those holiday things.

For many us, the only thing missing will be the pleasure. And that is a pity. The world needs pleasure. People need to enjoy their celebrations, to remind themselves that after all, life is not all grim responsibility, and stern duty. It was never meant to be. It's that age old question... "Do I have a right to be happy, to enjoy myself when someone else cannot? Can anything be good until everything is perfect?"

Well, one of the nice things about age old questions is that they can be answered over and over. To the first, no, of course not. We have no strict right to enjoy our lives. Nobody does. Our ability to enjoy, let alone the things themselves, is pure gift. We didn't earn it, we just got it, free, for nothing. There is no good reason at all why we were born in the Red River Valley and not in Bangladesh. There is no good reason at all, certainly no merit of our own, why we were born sensitive living human beings, capable of great pleasure, rather than an amoeba or a rutabaga.

But the fact that we have no right to such good feelings is all the more reason to enjoy them fully. It is hard to get very excited about something a person has earned. That is just the way it is supposed to be. Gifts are lots more fun than wages.

And to the second age old question, it is simply a part of the human condition that good and evil exist side by side. Christ was born to begin the New Kingdom, not complete it. Pleasure and pain, kindness and cruelty, justice and injustice, both must be embraced and understood. There is suffering in the world. There is phoniness, vanity and greed. We cannot pretend there isn't. We must, if we hope to live in the real world, face those evils, challenge them, engulf them. To turn away from them with closed eyes is foolishness, it is a lie.

But precisely the same is true of the good in our lives. That, too, is real. We must recognize that, and celebrate it. To turn away from the joy of life is every bit as great a lie.

Should we feel guilty? Sure. We all eat too much, waste too much on foolishness, enjoy too many luxuries. We should simplify our lives, redirect some of our resources. But let's not close one eye while we are in the process of opening the other. To deny the joy that is in our lives, even for the noblest of motives, even if that joy is not yet in everyone's life, is a death dealing thing. It is as destructive of the spirit as hunger is destructive of the body. And ultimately, it does no one any good to destroy.

So, all you hidden romantics, come out of the closet. Let yourselves feel good. Indeed, Christ has been born. The divine has become human, so nothing human should ever be completely condemned. Everything human must be, to one degree or another, enjoyed.

From 1980 through 1982, Father Sandell served as Chaplain to the Bishop O'Reilly Council No. 3918,Grafton, North Dakota Chapter of the Knights of Columbus. "Scattered Thoughts" is a collection of essays based on columns originally written for the Chaplain's Corner, section of the Council's monthly newsletter.