IT'S THE _____ TIME OF THE YEAR.

I've been thinking a lot about the experience of Christmas.

I've always loved it. December, the holiday season, lights, swirling people, the feeling of joy and humanity mingling amidst once-a-year melodies and buttered-up treats everywhere.

I still love it. Or I will again. But this has been a tough year. A very challenging one in multiple ways. 

I have not had the same experience this season. I've tried. And had many good moments and made some good memories. 

I've loved the people I've been with. Drank some good coffee. A lot. Eaten some sugar. Listened to Pentatonix. Tchaikovsky, and Sufjan Stevens incessantly. Every time I try to play something else - say, Cat Power, then I hear "...but Daddy, it's Christmas season, can we PLEASE just listen to Christmas music!" I acquiesce the majority of the time on that one. It's a battle where I'm the perpetual villain.

It's also been a tough season. This post isn't about the reasons that it's been tough. It's about the feeling I've had this season that's different. Right now, it's the present. But someday it will be a memory. 

Someday it will be a memory. 

I love the fragility of memory and how it lets us move on with life and leave things behind; often times things that should be left behind out of survival or necessity or in order to prioritize new focuses and opportunities. 

But some things need to be remembered, and remembered not just as concrete experiences (what, when, who, where, etc.), but as emotional passages. My heart has gone through some deep tunnels and twisty turns this year and I'm having a difficult time finding the familiar joy I've always felt this time of year. 

I don't think it's a bad thing to try and hang on to the feeling. Not to drag it out or make it more acute, but to make sure I remember. Because some things don't make sense until you experience them. And I feel like I'm having an experience; a passage of something that will pass, but that I should remember. 

I'm sad. At the happiest time of the year. 

The logical part of my brain - and I am very logical in certain ways when it comes to finding clarity - knows that there are many joyful experiences and wonderful times ahead and some of the feelings I have now will dissipate; compost away into the heap of forgotten months that shape you without consciously realizing. I have so many people I care about, so many good things going on, so much to practice gratitude for. I am grateful for these things. Most of all the people; the many people I am surrounded with who bring support and joy in so many ways. 

This is a hard month this time around. Maybe there will be other Decembers like this in my future; I'm guessing the classic ones I'm used to will likely outweigh these. 

But I don't want to forget how tough this has been. I think I need to remember. 

Because I want to understand better, going forward, the people who experience this every year. Every December, every holiday season. The sadness.

The sadness and even loneliness amidst being surrounded by joy and love. Even when you're in the middle of that and it's directed at you. You can still have those feelings; if I deal with some of these things with the support system I have, then I don't know how so many people deal when they're truly alone and have everything crumbling around.

I don't know, and I want to keep a little piece of that feeling with me; a slice of this month's experience to keep handy and accessible for the coming years when I'm feeling jollygood and it's almost impossible to understand how anyone could not be feeling the holiday spirit. 

So yeah, I wanna remember. Ideally the right amount. It's hard hanging on to hope sometimes, or trying to find it or resurrect it, but it's still important to keep alive, and maybe, maybe 

I will be there in a future December to be there for someone who understands. Even if it's just a little bit. Who understands how hard joy and jolly can be sometimes. 

In a left turn here, I subscribe to the dual and perhaps dueling ideas that 1) you can and should own up to your feelings and emotions honestly and 2) you can also push yourself to own up to them, and then to continue moving on and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, even (platitude coming up)...

...fake it til you make it. There is something to that. 

The idea of trying to bring your best, of trying to model for others, especially children, of how you can respond in the face of adversity or things not going your way, and creating joy and joyful experiences, EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T FEEL LIKE IT, and realizing at some point, sometimes, you get sucked into it and it turns real. 

Lot of good moments this season. Lot to remember.

Joyeux Noel, all. Love you. Especially my wife, the delectable and patient Countess Becca who brings joy to so many surrounding her. 

Including me. 

MY FAVOURITE LIBRARIAN.

Right before our first child was born, I told our families, "...I don't like all this 'I'm gonna be favourite uncle, favourite auntie' stuff I keep hearing from people. I know it's said to be funny, but guess what? Some of you are going to see our daughter more frequently, others less so. This whole "am I your favourite uncle/aunty?" thing starts off funny, but eventually feelings start getting hurt. Thank you for loving her already and being an important part of her world, now it would be awesome if we can all can build the best thing possible with her that is unique."

Unique. I've held to that through the births and development of our other children. The idea of building relationships that are unique and special, not better. Do some end up stronger than others? Do some end up deep and frequent and embedded? Do our kids gravitate to some family more than others over shared interests, personalities, and familiarity?

Yes, certainly yes. That's how life is. But we have never referred, or tolerated the idea of some relatives or family being referred to 'as favourites,' even in jest. Because again, those jests are a short distance away from cutting deep eventually. The types of cuts that can lead to resentment, jealousy, hurt, and the devaluation or damaging of relationships.

We're all hypocrites, of course.

My favourite librarian is leaving.

My sister-in-law. More than a sister-in-law and more than a librarian, but those are good starting titles.

I am a hypocrite. Because she is my favourite.

I love our little community library for many reasons. The books. The environment. The employees. A peculiar, odd, unique little public library.

And she is my favourite. Technically, she's not a librarian, per se. She is a library assistant / supervisor (Librarian is a term generally denoting the director of the branch and is a specialized and specific degree...I think). But since the article says 'librarian,' and I've referred to her as such accidentally and not over the years, I'll continue to use it here.

I have watched and marveled at her patience, kindness, and genuine affection for patron after patron who comes in. Anyone who thinks public libraries aren't relevant today hasn't spent time in one. You want a cross-section of humanity? Go hang out for a couple hours. The academics, the homeless, the cultured, the students, the kids, the parents, the teens, the city employees, the millennials, the elderly, the infirm, the thinkers and makers and adventurers and discoverers and inventors and wanderers and wonderers and...

they're all there, with their infinite personalities and questions.

And time and time again, she helped with a smile. A real smile. I think of the many times after work, outside work, where she would affectionately refer to different experiences or interactions and her love for her job and the people who inhabited and passed through. To say nothing of the joy she passed along at being able to talk about and recommend books across genres. It was real. A real and true investment of pride and love that she made for sixteen years.

I remember when she was working hard to get a position within the library system. Working another full-time paid job, doing unpaid volunteer time at the library to get hours, going sunup to sundown to pursue her dream of working there. And then she did, and has left a mark, and is leaving for another dream.

I'll go back. But she has been such a joyful and vibrant presence for so many years that...it's gonna be hard.

I will go back. But I'll have to work up to it. And it's gonna take time.

Au revoir, Rach. Thanks for your service, always with a smile, and frequently accompanied by humorous banter, witty observations, and interesting recommendations.

You were my favourite.

HOMO SUM, HUMANI NIHIL A ME ALIENUM PUTO.

Mudbound. It has been a long while since I have experienced a film of this power. Still trembling with rage at the vileness humanity is capable of. And at the supportive and enabling role the country I love has played in some of the most inexcusable and bleakest vileness.

Racism. Class. PTSD. Loveless marriage. A quadrilogy of undercurrents sliding Mudbound’s narratives along, with one standing above the others.

I think of the hypocrisies we have committed so many times in sending those of a class, those of a race off to war, to make us proud and lift the shining light of freedom up high…and upon return...yank a shroud, a social Faraday cage, a muzzle over them. Disposable heroes. The convenience of benefiting from heroism minus the inconvenience of having to acknowledge it.

Mudbound covers much ground in multiple voices as it slogs us through the farm of a post-WWII Mississippi farmstead and the two families who may live on the same land, but who live vastly different lives. Tragedy all around, with little moments of connection and tiny flickers of hope.
This is what I do not understand: I am a thinking person. And I am a feeling person. Maybe more so than some and less so than others. But a combination of those two things is what makes most of us human.

To see this film and the roots of human vileness and to realize A) this is fictional, but it is - and I concede no ground on this point - the attitudes and the actions taken are true to what have been documented as horrific reality. Reality. Again and again and again.

And the racism shown in this is brutal, bleak, and out in the open. But when I look at the roots of what drives that hatred, that ability to look at another person based on their skin color and see them not as a child of God - and therefore a brother or sister to yourself - then I have to think this. And then say it aloud:

Could this happen again?
Is this happening again?
What are the thoughts that lead to the attitudes that lead to the words that lead to the actions that lead us down this road the wrong way?

Again?

I want to be kind. And loving. And accepting.

I want to dialogue. I hold my right and privilege to converse with anyone, without agenda, as sacred.

When I look at the roads that lead us to some of those darkest places in our past, then I have to look at the mirror, gather those I care about close and am privileged to help raise and learn from,
and say to those in power, or those seeking power:

I will fight to keep those who wax nostalgic for those ‘simpler times,’
those who use euphemisms to minimize and shrug off the hard parts of the past,
those who who do not condemn others who are blatant and unapologetic in their racism,
those who gleefully, wink-wink and backslap their way around the language and nuances of the behaviors that LED to the roots of lynchings, Jim Crow, and a fascist and false Christianity…
to those fitting the above who are IN POWER OR SEEKING POWER, I oppose you. I have a tiny voice, but it can be shrill and occasionally harmonize with a choir. A choir without white robes or bedsheets on heads.

And if it’s within my power, I will do whatever small part I can to get you OUT of power, or prevent you from GAINING power.

I am speaking to those seeking power and control. I also believe in the capacity to change. I believe in redemption and trying to show a better way. And that is done, most frequently and most successfully, through relationships and dialogue, not guilt-mongering, public shaming, and feel-good callout memes. For ordinary people with no thirst for power or control, that is what I can give. Conversation, an ear, a good discussion and ideally open hearts.

But for those in power - and look. Look! There’s no need to name names to identify who they are. Look at their words and actions. Look at those who separate everything into completely binary worlds: Us versus Them. Evil versus Good. The idea that if you speak out against your leaders, you’re speaking out against your country, your armed forces, your allegiance as a citizen.

False. As a joyful citizen of this wonderful country in so many ways, I want it to be a world that is joyful for all. That is respectful to and for all. A world that is not slowly slipping down a muddy path where men with stained white sheets on their ridiculous fucking heads yank a black man out of bed in the dark of night and torture him brutally for looking at a white woman wrong.

Those ACTS don’t happen overnight. The roots to those acts are born in the hearts and minds of every person. And we either move forward and away from that. Or we go back. There is no standing still.

It’s a cliche, but let’s just ask this anyway. Not rhetorically. WWJD? What WOULD Jesus do?

Talk tax cuts and upping military spending with men in suits?
Or walk across a muddy field to share a meal with a farm family?

I don’t know. I can’t speak for him. Just like nobody else can. But what is consistent with what we know about him? How does the picture we are painted of Jesus match up with many of those in power?

Watch Mudbound. Netflix streaming. Maybe not with your young children yet. Not yet. Or do. The violent and false words of those in power are more disturbing to me for our children to hear than the the violent and true records of atrocities that have actually been committed. And are in danger of being committed with ever increasing frequency.

And remember. There is a time to be kind. And there is a time to stand up and fight. They are both powerful tools - not weapons, tools - to use. So good luck on using them. See y’all around.