The end of the year is right around the corner and I can’t stop thinking about what a strange year it’s been. Terrible in so many ways. The pandemic. The current president. The mingling of the two. I’ve been reading past posts I’ve done on my gaming throughout the year to get ready for my end of the year game awards I was playing Syndicate back at the end of February right before the soft lockdown. I can’t believe I played Syndicate this year. I feel like it was ages ago. I also realized I played a ton more games than I remembered playing. To be fair, most of them I only played for a few hours. But, still. Good Pizza, Great Pizza was this year? If Found? Code Vein? I feel as if I’m living in some alternate universe and I want to get out of it.
Anyway. I’m not here to talk about video games. That will be a post (or three) by itself later. I’m here to talk about how happy I am to see the end of this year and how weird that it’s simultaneously been the longest year and the shortest year ever. I have heard the same thing from several people so it’s not just me. February seems like such a long time ago, but it also seems like just yesterday. I can’t help thinking about that younger me and smile ruefully at how naive I was. Not just me, but everyone in America, really. So many of us thinking the pandemic would last a month or two. I was supposed to fly to NY in early July and pooh-poohed my mother at the end of February for suggesting I cancel it. I was also planning on flying out to Philly over Halloween and surely I would be able to do that!
Yeah, no. Looking back, the idea that I would be able to fly in July is unfathomable. I’m not beating myself up about it because very few people thought the pandemic would last as long as it did. Back in February/March, the general thought in America was that it would be a few months before life returning to normal or some semblance thereof. It isn’t our fault as our government handled it so fucking poorly in the beginning. Not only did they underplay how terrible it was, but their advice was contrary. Don’t wear masks and go about your business as usual! Do wear masks. Six-feet apart. But still buy things!
The worst is the president. He had done active harm and January 20th cannot come soon enough for me. Trevor Noah did a bit about all the things this president has done wrong concerning the handling of the coronavirus and I couldn’t watch the whole thing because it was both enraging and profoundly depressing. One thing that has been made crystal clear during the pandemic is how little certain lives mean to those in charge. All the talk about it only affecting those who were already at high-risk wore me down. Even if it were true (which it isn’t), don’t our lives count? Don’t we matter?
Side note: It’s been a hard year for me because I’ve had to come to grip with the fact that there are so many things wrong with me that aren’t noticeable on the surface. I don’t feel like I have the right to say I have a disability or disabilities because each is so minor. All my food sensitivities (not allergies, not Celiac, not life-threatening), all my other sensitivities/allergies (again, not life-threatening), my shitty immune system (blah, blah, blah), the sheer exhaustion I feel on a daily basis, and more. Migraines, too. Sensory issues. Each on its own is an irritant. Together, it’s almost overwhelming. One thing I’ve been thankful for this year is that I’ve not had the sheer amount of sinus crap that I’ve had in the past years, probably because I only go out once a month.
Let’s talk holidays. As most people know, I don’t celebrate them in general. I don’t care for them for a litany of reasons that I don’t want to list and I’m more than happy to pretend they don’t exist. Especially Christmas. For many years, I’ve actively hated Christmas. Not the holiday itself, but everything it stood for plus the fact that the push towards Christmas started earlier and earlier every year. I used to rail against it, starting with an op-ed I did when I was in junior high school about the commercialization of Christmas (oh, I was so young and naive then!). I used to put up anti-Christmas avatars on Facebook and Twitter starting in December to let people know how much I loathed the holiday.
Then a weird thing happened last year. I simply didn’t care about Christmas. I didn’t suddenly fall in love with it and want to drink eggnog throughout the season, but I wasn’t mad about it, either. I had no desire to post screeds about how much I hated it or how alone I felt in my dislike for the holiday. I didn’t have to grit my teeth to get through it–it just meant nothing to me. I can’t tell you how marvelous it was! It was like Googling an old ex who had been haunting your dreams for years, staring at the picture, and feeling nothing. I was free! It’s like religion to me in a way. I grew up very religious and when I renounced my religion, I spent years furious at it for lying to me. I hated it and railed about the damage whenever I had a chance. I wasn’t wrong, but it kept me very much enmeshed in the same system I was trying to flee. The day when I could think about it without feeling anything at all was the day I was truly done with it. It’s like that saying, “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.”
To be clear, I have no regrets about my years of railing against Christmas. I still stand by many of my criticisms. It’s just that it’s much nicer to be able to roll with it with equanimity than to hate it with every fiber of my being. I don’t have to say it’s a good thing; I just don’t have to suffer through it, either. It’s how I feel about forgiveness. I don’t think you ever have to forgive someone, but for your own sake, you have to move through the anger at some point. I’ve seen many arguments about what forgiveness actually is and I think it’s a matter of semantics with some of the definitions. To me, saying you forgive someone is saying it’s ok they did that thing. I firmly believe there are some things that are never ok. There comes a point where getting enraged is detrimental to my health, but it’s not something I can force myself to chill out on. It takes time, taiji, and just letting it breathe.
So. My one Christmas concession is listening to O Holy Night. It’s been a tradition for me to post different versions of them every year in the lead up to Christmas along with the two other non-Christmas Christmas songs I enjoy. This year, however, I haven’t. I just can’t really grasp that Christmas is five days away. This year is so weird, I prefer to think it never happened. However. I did start listening to different versions today just because and found one I actually had not heard before. i will get to that in a second, but first, here are the two other songs.
First up is Vienna Teng’s Atheist Christmas Carol. It’s warm, it’s lovely, and it evokes the feeling of the holiday without being about Christmas. Plus, I just adore Vienna Teng. Also, there as a gorgeous cello track in it that just warms my heart. The cello is my favorite instrument and not just because I played it.
Next up is Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun, in this case, with the backing of Bryan Cox (physicist and musician). This one makes me cry every time. It’s not about Christmas, which he admits he likes despite all the trappings. It’s about the familial love and the feeling of being home. I don’t have that and I probably never will. Sobbing to this song is one of my Christmas traditions that just feels right.
Now. To my new instant fave of O Holy Night. I was listening to different version when I saw this one pop up on YouTube. It was posted a month ago by Ben Caplan. I hadn’t heard of him, but I decided I might as well give it a listen because why not? It starts off moody and in a minor key, and I was put off at first. Then he starts singing and his voice is a cross of Leonard Cohen’s and Thom Yorke from Radiohead with a healthy dash of Tom Waits thrown in. It threw me off and I thought, “What are you doing to my song?!?” I almost turned it off, but there was something there that called out to me. I decided to stick it out and by the end, I was won over. Not just won over. I was awed by it. His voice is intense, deep, rich, and lush. There’s an orchestra backing him (which means cello!). What is there not to love?
He took a song I had heard dozens of versions of and made it into something completely different. I read his explanation. He’s Jewish from Nova Scotia and was aware of Christmas (who isn’t in the Western hemisphere?), but he didn’t care for most of the carols. He decided that since he didn’t like them, he would do it his way. It’s a difficult listen at first. It’s complex and layered, and it’s now in my top three of favorite versions ever. I’ve listened to it on repeat and I hear something new every time. Here now is my definitive version of O Holy Night.