By Teresa Willis

The NoHo staff meeting for the December issue was nearly over before anyone mentioned the holidays. (That “anyone” was me.) At the mere mention, my fellow NoHo staffers began to shuffle in their seats, look to the floor and get generally grumpy. I got the message that if it were up to them, NoHo Magazine would let December come and go with nary a mention of Thanksgiving, Chanukah, or (dare I say it?) Christmas. “Do we really have to do anything about the holidays?” they whined.

I am usually a Pollyanna in these situations. I love the holidays. I have always had good experiences with the dreaded Christmas season, actually enjoying my relatives and friends with reckless abandon. “Come on,” I pleaded, like a cheerleader at a pep rally. “All the magazines are going to have Kathi Lee and Gary Shandling in Santa hats plastered on the covers. How can we fly in the face of such tradition? This is the December issue.”

My comrades performed the psychic equivalent of wadding up pieces of paper and throwing them at me. But in the end, I prevailed. There would be a Christmas piece and I would write it.

And here it is.

My extensive informal research has revealed a not so startling fact: many people think the holidays suck. Popular sentiment seems to be that the commercialism is obnoxious and the season itself seems to be an intense string of inane events that coax most of us from our homes by tapping some ancient sense of obligation.

Perhaps the discontent lies in the broken promises of childhood. After all, if we were raised traditionally regarding Christmas, it all started with a lie. Yes, I’m talking about our societal sacred cow, Santa Claus. If your parents did everything right, they would have done their best to convince you that this ridiculous myth was true, that some magic fat guy actually fit down the chimney and left all this great stuff under the tree. Inevitably, the lie was exposed and Christmas was never the same again.

That’s the best anyone — even those of us from loving families with attentive parents — could hope for. But if you are the product of a family whose functionality falls anywhere below the Leave it to Beaver level, the “Santa Claus lie” may seem a laughable complaint. With problems such as alcohol, drugs, divorce, and child abuse, the idea of Peace on Earth, Good Will toward Men may seem more ludicrous than flying reindeer. Many adults from this sort of scenano fervently wish there really was a Grinch who could steal every trace of Christmas, and they would creatively detain Cindy Loo-Hoo to see that he got away with it. Nonetheless, Christmas persists. Year after year, retail sales and suicide rates
predictably skyrocket.

Some people I’ve talked to decide not to “do” Christmas. They stubbornly maintain that if they ignore it, it can’t hurt them. I maintain that not doing Christmas is like not doing daylight. It’s coming, whether you observe it or not. And if you try to deny it, it’ll get you in the end. It may be the McDonald’s commercial with the actress that looks like your mother. Perhaps it will be your neighbor’s glow-in-the-dark nativity scene. Maybe your co-worker who got your name in the office pool will give you one of those little plastic snowy globe things with a sleigh-riding scene that reminds you of your childhood sled, “Rosebud.” Whatever it is, you’ll get a lump in your throat, or a tear in your eye, or your heart will swell up like the Grinch’s. And, if only for a moment, you’ll give into the sadness that you swore you weren’t going to feel this year.

What to do? No, I’m not going to tell you to see your family. That’s probably the last thing you need. You still can’t change them. But many people have gotten past this holiday bitterness anyway. They are recovering Grinches — people who used to hate Christmas, but now have taken responsibility to create their own holiday.

“If you wait around for somebody else to bring a sense of family to your door, it’s not going to happen — especially in L.A.,” says Sam Longoria, of North Hollywood’s Wild Side Theatre. His answer? “I go volunteer at the Salvation Army. Makes you real grateful. I mean, I don’t have much, but these people have nothing.”

“The last thing I want to do on Christmas is see my family,” says Kay Stern, a waitress who lives in Studio City. “So I mail the presents and give them a call Christmas morning. I like to see them other times of the year. Christmas is so emotionally loaded.” But what does she do on Christmas? “Spend it with my friends, my support group. I used to feel sorry for myself and like, go to movies alone. People would call and check on me, but I’d say, ‘No. I’m okay.’ Now I’m not afraid to tell them that I don’t want to be alone, that I need them.”

“When I was in high school, my sister and I used to split on mom and dad,” says Oliver H., a college student from Burbank. “We’d take the car, get stoned, and go to some church we’d never been to before for midnight mass. We weren’t Catholic or even religious, so it was just like some weird show. We’d sit in the back and giggle. We’d get home and they’d ask where we’d been and we’d just say, ‘Mass.’ It really freaked them out. Now I’ve been sober for a while, but I still pick up my sister for mass on Christmas Eve. And even though we aren’t stoned, we still sit in the back and giggle.”

Even if your junkie mother shot your newborn kitten on Christmas Eve when you were twelve, you can still figure out a way to enjoy Christmas. Let go of the expectations and disappointments of the past. Holding on to them won’t bring back the kitten, or make your mother apologize. It could just serve to make you miserable year after year. And if you’re miserable, you’ll be missing the time of year when a large percentage of your fellow humans are on their best behavior. At the very least, you have to take advantage of that, no matter how much you miss your kitten.

People are nicer to each other this time of year. Even mean people soften a bit. They buy each other presents. They take time to be with people they love. Many people, who otherwise would never consider it, go to church and pray for peace on earth. Many people, who otherwise would never consider it, actually bake cookies. Any way you look at it, that has to be a good thing. So enjoy it!