Merry Christmas (War Is Over)

"A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear "

Okay, so I think it's time to write about the holidays. If You want it...

This time of year, just before Thanksgiving, and through New Years Day is a strange and wonderful time. People start talking about the "Reason for the Season" and it being the "Most Wonderful Time of the Year!" For me, in reality it's a time of year that has a lot of expectations and rarely delivers. I enter into every holiday season with a certain amount of trepidation. See, I know how much I love the spirit of Christmas, it's got a weird child-like spectacle that has never left my soul. However, the wonder and amazement that were there when I was a kid never fully manifest. Hmm... let me rewind.
First allow me to describe the Dempsey Christmas! Actually I don't have much to say... Pretty traditional really! We'd wake up early Christmas Morning open presents, after which Mom would fix a nice breakfast for us all. After which some people might go back to sleep. Mostly just dad. In later years it seemed to get earlier and earlier when Liz and Mom would come in and wake me up. Dad and I would find common ground in trying to resist the waking. I began to think my sister and mother were crazy. I later figured, Diz wasn't even going to sleep. Yeah, that's about how it went since I could remember up to and including last year.
In the year 2000 I was a freshman at East Carolina University. I spent Thanksgiving with My Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob in Atlanta. It was the first time I spent a major holiday away from my immediate family. I was pretty miserable. I love my Aunt and Uncle but they are very very very devout Catholic and I was not. They also were very old fashioned and I was not. I honestly felt like I was 7 years-old and being baby sat. It was an incredibly boring couple of days and I was perfectly glad when it was over. It was also important because it was my first time away from school and thus the first time I missed my friends at school! When Christmas break came around a few weeks later I was overwhelmed with joy to finally be visiting back home in Indiana. Probably the most excited I'd ever been to get back home... certainly in Indiana. Here enters my first ever Christmas time let-down. My parents literally picked me up from the Airport and dropped me off at home. I spent the first 24 hours home from University, alone. It was odd to say the least. That would also be the first time I met Grizzy, my mom's cat. I didn't have a car, or cell phone at the time. I didn't know people's phone numbers. It was a long night. The rest of the break had it's ups and downs. However by the time Christmas rolled around I was finding I had trouble relating to old friends and simply looking forward to getting back to school to be around my new ones. I will always remember it because it was the first time I ever disproportionately did NOT enjoy the holidays.
Sadly, it only got worse. My sophomore year I transferred to Ball State University. I was closer to home, and I had a Girlfriend. She was VERY close with her family, something I was finding more and more that I was not. That year, tragedy had struck the country and that particular holiday season held with it a certain amount of sorrow. I remember the grief I had over 9/11 and how much interest I poured into The first Harry Potter movie that came out that year. That along with the Lord of the Rings movie were to be the highlights of my break. I was noticing just how dispersed my family had become. My sister now well within high school had a very busy social life and the Rents seemed to have developed new interests as well. Until Marie came and visited me that year I found myself very lonely again. By this time my old high school friends were either busy with new high school social groups or busy visiting family being back from college themselves. Okay maybe lonely isn't the right word... it was more disappointment. Yeah! I was disappointed because I expected to feel happier to be home and in the familiar. Compared to Marie's family which was so warm and welcoming of her return, mine was cool and lackadaisical. It was then that I had the mission to make sure the next year would be better.
The year 2002.
It was the year that debuted Avril Lavigne, George Harrison died, and Emo music really started to get a foot hold in popular culture. I know that's all music based but... well that my barometer for the past. The music that was happening. In other words... it was a dark time! Marie and I had broken up and gotten back together only very shortly before Christmas Break started. So I was needing to my time home in the Bus to be more than just a period of relaxation. I needed the family closeness and spirit of Christmas to fill my soul! See 2002 was also the year that I decided to make a very personal attempt to try and regain my religion. In the summer of 2001 I decided to stop going to church because of a few people who had shown me the negative side of Christianity. So that year I was kinda lost, I'd been depressed for the first real time ever and didn't like what I was feeling. I searched for answers every where. The church seemed like one of the best places. I started going to Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic church was very close to campus, with a few friends. When I got home my Mother was VERY happy to know that I'd picked it back up. During Christmas there was the same distance between my family. It wasn't negative, just everyone doing their own thing, even more so than the previous year. So remembering the previous year began planning family activities. Yeah... me! lol Movies, shopping trips, dinner, and whatever else I could come up with. I let my parents know what I was thinking and they were mostly game for it. Dizzy however had her own agenda and usually opted out at the last minute. In the end though, it still felt forced and fake. I drove up to Huntington to visit with Marie and again, by comparison it all felt so different. I returned home for a few more days before break was ended and it couldn't end soon enough by that point.
The next couple years had a few improvements because of one very simple life-altering amendment. Spring of 2003 my sister totalled my Isuzu Trooper. I loved that fucking car and it was no more. As compensation Mom gave me her Dodge Caravan (yep the van I currently drive) and I demanded the ability to take my car to school with me. Mostly because I wanted a vehicle there but also because there, Dizzy could wreck the damned thing. lol So, I had a car that year for school which meant I left for Break when I wanted! I waited until the very last moment before the dorms closed to go home. No sooner was I home, and I was at the movies, or visiting friends, or in Greenwood Christmas Shopping, or whatever! The point was, I was out of the house as much as possible! The family void was still there but it's effects were diminished by my own absence form the house. It was a GREAT improvement! the next year it only got better because then I was in my first apartment and didn't even have to leave! I didn't even come home that year until Christmas Eve. The freedom I experienced that year was unparalleled. I was basically only home for Christmas that year. I think I left a day or 2 later. The down side comes when the Ice Storm of 2004 hit Muncie and forced me back to my Parent's house because of the lack of power. I couldn't want to get home more though. That was also the first year I started referring to that house as "My Parent's House" rather than "Home."
The years that followed graduation have been up and down. They weren't really ever spectacular because for awhile there I was living back at the Rents' house and it was just kinda there. Even last Christmas when I wasn't even living there I still stayed there as a favor to my borders. To be perfectly fair though... last year's felt a lot closer then Christmas has in quite some time. I not only got to appreciate my sister being home, but I celebrated with friends and a certain special someone for the first time. It was a nice feeling buying presents for people other than family whom I cared about.
This year promises to be better still! I feel like this, at the age of 27, will be my first true adult Christmas. I am truly out of the Rents' House for good and most importantly that will mean I won't have to get up before the crack of dawn because my Sister and Mother are truly psychotic! That fact alone excites me about Christmas this year. Though, I know my Mom and I just know when it comes down to it, she's going to make me promise to come over early to open gifts and I'll agree because...it's mom. Sigh.
So I guess a final thought would be that the holidays SUCK! They suck because they make you spend a lot of time and money on things you wouldn't otherwise spend them on... like family and friends! Oh wait... maybe that's a good thing?! See I don't think these holidays endure because some Uptight Europeans got hungry once and were fed by the future-impoverished and neglected denizens of the Americas, or because a Middle-Eastern Chick accidentally had a baby before having sex. I think these holidays endure because they force us take part in the sometimes awkward tradition of family. They make us stop working long enough to enjoy some time with our friends and spend money on people other than ourselves. That... might be the ACTUAL "Reason for the season", and, THAT makes it the "Most wonderful time of the year."

"...And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun..."

-S-