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superpeanutgarden · 5 months

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Christmas Emotions: Why I will never hang a shining star upon the highest bough

Content Warning: A massive rant about grief, plus personal trauma

I have a complicated relationship with the month of December. Not just in the traditional Living-in-the-northern-hemisphere-it's-dark-and-cold-and-I'm-depressed way.

You see, I experienced a traumatic separation from my adopted brother when I was thirteen. (I mean, my whole family did. it has left us all affected in different ways.) His birthday is in December.

We lost custody on Memorial Day weekend (a fact I did not remember until this year), but his birthday is halfway through December.

He turned 19 this year. (We lost custody 13 years ago.) The name we gave him (probably not his name anymore) was Jared. It sounds like a shitpost, but my sibling and I were robbed of- among other things- a whole year of "Jared, 19, never fucking learned how to read" jokes.

Grief is hard. It's messy and weird in ways you can never truly know or understand until you experience it. The longing of something that will never happen again, wishing that it was all a dream, hating how other people get to be happy and hating yourself for being bitter in the face of joy. The thing that annoys me the most is when people try to erase the ugly parts. (Not just of grief, but that's the focus of this blog post.) Specifically when people ignore how grief affects you for the rest of your life. It never stops, never fully goes away, never truly dulls. It only gets smaller, less frequent, more surprising.

December is a whole freaking month devoted to hope and community. The commodification of the sacred tradition of solidarity has sanitized the concepts to the point of being almost entirely repugnant. There were several years where I could not bear to listen to any christmas music written during the last 100 years because it was too happy and did not reflect the rage and emptiness I felt. Thankfully I am past that point, but it took a lot of reflection and intentional thinking to get here. We're talking three years minimum where all I wanted to listen to were hymns that focused on the fact that December is a month of darkness and cold, and how the concept of hope was once (and still might be) far away and hard to grasp.

To this day, there is a single song that sets me off every time I hear it. I call it "the cowards version of Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas". According to urban legend, the original lyrics were deemed 'too depressing' to be featured in the film "Meet Me in Saint Louis" by Judy Garland herself. I don't personally care why there are two versions around. One faces the reality that I have had to live with the past 13 years, that countless others face every year, and one erases it. It's not a big difference, there's only a single line that changed. "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" became "hang a shining star upon the highest bough." and that change infuriates me every time I experience it. Let me show you why

"Someday soon, we all will be together/ if the fates allow/ until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow/ and have yourself a merry little christmas now."

The song overall discusses how the singer is separated from their loved ones. Some, maybe even most, of the "faithful friends who are dear [...] gather near [...] once more", but there above quoted verse implies that there is someone still missing; perhaps more than one person. And yet, the singer urges the audience not to wait for those missing loved ones to return in order to find joy. Because sometimes it isn't that your sibling has moved out and your parents and little brother went up north to visit family and you have the house to yourself for Christmas Day. Sometimes the person you're missing is gone for years, sometimes they're never coming back. And what are you going to do about it? You can't just put your life on hold. TO quote another song entirely "the years start coming and they don't stop coming". Until they come back from vacation, or deployment, or self-inflicted isolation, or until you are all reunited in the afterlife, we all have to muddle through somehow. Can't go back, can't stand still, gotta move forward and find a way to have a merry little christmas with the people you still have.

Hope is beautiful, but it is also messy and those who need it most are often marred with blood and trench-dirt and rubble-dust and scorch-marks. (for God's sake, there's a fucking genocide going on in Palestine right now) Grief never goes away, but neither will I. My family will have to muddle through somehow for the rest of our lives, and by all the gods who care to listen, we will have ourselves a Merry Little Christmas right fucking Now, and we will honor the gaping hole in the fabric of our family but we will NOT allow it to rob us of more than it already has.

Anyway, Merry Christmas and Free Palestine

#you dont know me #but i know you #words words words #personal rant #sad thoughts #tw grief #grief journal #christmas

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