Maybe this year we wish each other, "Okay Holidays!"
Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, Christmas drenches New York in its festiveness; a lights-and-holly cityscape that recalls thousands of movies and makes everything you do outside feel a little unreal. This year, of course, it feels extra unreal. I couldn’t quite believe the gigantic trees being installed in the lobbies of empty office buildings around Wall Street. There were reindeer projections dancing across the floor of the Oculus that was so spookily empty I felt like the Christmas music should be playing at quarter-speed. Decorations always feel like party preparation, building up to some kind denouement, but this year the buildup has no drop.
On other years, the holidays stir up melancholy for a lot of people. I think it’s because it’s the one time of the year when we expect to be given happiness, like a wrapped-up present we didn’t have to do anything for. While every other month we’re okay with merely feeling okay, December is when the media and the party invitations and Instagram stories all tell us that we should be feeling cheery and warm and close and that it’s unacceptable to be alone. We’re relieved of that pressure this year. None of the usual plans, obligations, or opportunities for pleasure are present.
This is the first Christmas I’ll be spending apart from my parents and brother, who are in California. If the real gift of Christmas is that you’re thinking about somebody else, my family’s got tons of presents coming (they also have real presents coming, in the mail). I’ve missed them ambiently throughout the pandemic but it will be acute and specific over the holidays. Maybe all that missing will make it easier for me to let them know how much I love them (they read this newsletter, so I guess this is me telling them). In this awkward holiday season, stripped of the fantasies and symbols that we usually fixate on, my feelings are concentrated down to a simple homesickness that I haven’t felt so strongly since I was a kid.
Zucotti Park is lit up with white twinkly lights on every branch of every tree. It’s beautiful to walk through on my way to school. This week there were signs up about a “lunchtime outdoor silent disco” which means someone in Marketing & Events is trying really hard, but I can’t imagine it happening. There’s no party that’s coming, no audience for the decorations, but every morning is a small ritual of noticing for me. I notice that it’s beautiful, and that it’s December, that I miss my family. I notice that missing people you’ll get to see again, eventually, is a warm feeling.
What I’m reading
Food and Healing, by Annemarie Colbin
The most glaring error in our belief system [about health and illness], it seems to me, is the assumption that physiological “symptoms” (headaches, sneezing, fatigue, pimples, stomachaches, backaches, and all the rest) are mistakes, that they should be corrected or “treated,” and that if this is not done, things will get worse. In short, that the physical system will deteriorate unless we intervene…When we consider the stomachache itself an error, we get medicine very different from what we get when we consider it a warning signal and search for its cause.
Annemarie Colbin was the founder of my school, the Natural Gourmet Institute, so her ideas about eating whole foods, that are fresh and balanced and in harmony with tradition, have filtered down into the curriculum at every level. She developed her ideas in the 70s and 80s, which makes some of them extremely precocious, since most nutrition experts at the time were just telling people not to eat fat, but parts of her 1986 book can still feel dated at times.
The idea she’s expressing here, though, addresses a prevailing worldview that seems to have remained stagnant for centuries, at least in modern Western medicine. I grew up with a full bathroom cabinet of over-the-counter drugs and the understanding that most unpleasant sensations can be fixed. In an extreme case, that can lead to years of suppressing sensations that are trying to tell you that something serious is wrong. But even with nothing wrong, I think it does something to our psyche. We start to believe that any bad feelings ought to be eliminated. We don’t sit with them long enough to know whether there’s a problem we need to fix, or whether the only thing the unpleasant state needs in order to be resolved is a bit of time.