Welcome to suicide season! 

 This is the time of year when the most Americans take their own lives. 

Odd, what with all the loving family get togethers, what?

My sex and death obsessed friend DZaster is on the road this week, taking a left coast week.  I’ll bet she’s got facts and figures about suicide this time of year that would make our heads spin if we let her get going. 

I had a few friends over for Christmas Eve a couple years ago and we all told our horrible family Christmas story.  They were so pathetic that we couldn’t help but laugh, and laugh we did.  Until tears came to our eyes, our cheeks burned and our ribs ached we laughed.  Each story was worse than the last and completely true — which was the key.  The worse the story, the more we laughed.  That wasn’t enough.  We RETOLD each other’s story to even more hilarity.  A bunch of Scrooges indulging in “aren’t you glad we’re past that now”.  One of my very best holiday memories.  Sincerely, one of the very best.

Part of the party is the high expectations we all have in direct and SIMULTANEOUS contemplation of the reality we know and blow up into loathing and dread.

To the most part, my friends take their dysfunctions and use them in some socially acceptable way.  I, for example, have a big “knight in shining armor” thing going on and I try to use that people pleasing stuff as part of my profession.  That doesn’t work when you’re immersed in your dependent/co-dependent, neurotic, psychotic, actual human being family.  You have your flaws, they have theirs and some of the drama is very ancient and revered.  Family roles have a way of being replayed no matter how much sobriety and sanity you have on board in the rest of your day to day life.

One of the best things that has happened to me in my sobriety is to learn how fruitless it is of me to expect my family and friends to act the way I want them to and to feel and think as I do.  All I can do is change my attitude about them and their behaviors.   I can also change my own behavior and try to do the loving thing instead of the defensive thing or the offensive thing.  That is SO much easier to say than to do.

I won’t be perfect this holiday, my dear family, friends, loved ones and the ambushed.  I never have been and I’m not likely to get there this year.  I expect that I’ll come to a time when I’m frustrated by the music and the traffic and the bad weather and I’ll have some kind of breakdown in which I profanely bitch loud and long and pick apart people and ideas.  I’ll probably break down and quote Dickens another year: “If I could work my will, every idiot with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips would be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart.”  Glad to get that one over with.

I am doing my best to just surrender to the whole thing.  To just let happen whatever happens and go with it.  To make Christmas be about giving and loving and doing that on my own part and letting everybody else do whatever they want. 

This Christmas, I’m not going to particularly decorate, but I think I’ll try to keep a fire in the fireplace and maybe put a little something bright, cheery and seasonal out somewhere I’ll see it a lot.

I must confess I’ve not shopped even a little bit yet this year.  I’m leaving Friday to go to So. Car. to see my neice wed, maybe I’ll try to pick up a little something here and there while I’m being a tourist. 

since I’m on a cash only basis this Christmas, it’s likely to be a little spare compared to some years in the past, but I’ll do my best for the good old american economy and I won’t be shopping at Wal-Mart, so it’s a two-fer even if the holiday crowds make me very very very crazy. 

Can you believe they’re predicting snow for Thursday?  Damn. 

Not a word about politics.  Aren’t you proud of me?

Anyway, I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving and I’m looking forward to your mass produced letters and tube sock presents.