Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Monday, 14 Dec 1992 08:43:40 CST
From: MJ <U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.suicide.holiday
Subject: (Repost) Unmerry Christmas Emotion

               THE UNMERRY CHRISTMAS EMOTIONS

Christmas frequently is an emotional catastrophe.  The "merry
Christmas" season, joy-to-the-world days, happy Chanukah time of the
year bring many people to the brink of suicide, divorce and murder.
The newspapers are filled with violence and there is argument under
the mistletoe.

It is a paradox that has been intriguing psychiatrists for half a century,
but few people are aware that a dread of December isn't singular and
out of key but timeless and nearly universal.

The truth is few people get through the gala holidays without feeling
decidedly upset at one time or another.  With some it is only an
aesthetic flinching from all the insistent jolliness.  Others, particularly
those suspended in the middle years between taskless childhood and
self-indulgent old age, are harassed and frightened by the cheerless
shopping, wrapping, mailing, cooking and debts.  There is a growing
disgust that what was intended to be a gentle religious festival has been
hoked out of shape by the vandalism of vendors.

Quite a number of people have an old grudge against Christmas, which
regularly renews the disappointment, suffering or loneliness of some
childhood Christmases.  A proportion of these have what amounts to
an annual breakdown at Christmas--doctors call it the holiday syndrome
or Christmas neurosis.  The main symptoms are depression and anger;
they don't always show, since ho-ho heartiness seems to be obligatory.

These people are gloomy because of the idealized warmth and
sweetness of the season, not in spite of it.  Since they don't experience
the elation and good will that seems to abound, their inner desolation
can only be viewed as a personal failure.  Lacking the spirit of
friendliness that pervades others, they mark themselves down as
insufficient human beings.

Many can bask in Christmas as children do, frankly relishing the food
and drink treats, the excitement of clandestine gift hiding, the giddiness
of parties and colored lights.  It's a mass regression to childhood, a safe
self-indulgence that can be atoned for neatly by New Year's resolutions
and taking down the decorations.

But even those with a benign childhood to regress into have flickers of
doubt about Christmas.  Carol singing can grow tedious, week after
week.  Outdoor decorations have become sharply competitive and are
irksome to arrange.  Gift-shopping is exhaustion and irritation in a pure
form.  The relatives gather, and are not always a happy sight.

An increasing proportion of adults deliberately plan to be away from
home for Christmas in order to avoid the seasonal pressures, only to
find themselves sourly marking the oddity of Christmas lights in a palm
tree or the revolting folksiness of strangers in a ski lodge, while
Christmas cards from people they forgot pursue them.

"Not being joyous during the Christmas season is much more common
than most of us realize," observed a report by four psychiatrists at the
University of Utah, who intensively studied the psychological
complaints at yuletide and found them profuse.

Dismay, to a mind degree at least, is total.  Sociologists have noted that
ordinary conversations during the pre-Christmas rush are rarely
luminous with good will.  People swap stories of their weariness, their
shopping mishaps, the greediness of their get; they are vastly uneasy
over the mounting expenses and their tendency to drink and eat too
much.  "There are few spontaneous exclamations about how wonderful
it all is," commented a distinguished Montreal psychiatrist, Dr. Alastair
MacLeod.  "There seems to be a great deal of hostility and anger over
being impelled into something distasteful."

The tender concepts of the season, in the Christian religion the
simplicity of a baby Savior and in Judaism the candle-light memorial to
freedom, are hard to discern under the smothering of carnival tensions.
Instead of the gain in tranquility expected, there is a steep loss.

One of the world's best-known psychoanalysts, Dr. Ernest Jones, once
wrote that Christmas represents psychologically "the idea of resolving
all family discord in happy reunion."  It's too fragile an idea to survey,
since distance, divorce and death can make it impossible and old
grievances within the family somehow manage to become fresh, raw
wounds again at Christmas.

The disappointment when the dream is foiled by the perversity of fate
or the immortality of quarrels is acute.  Christmas becomes a time of
ready rage.  The suicide rate climbs; murders, fist fights, mutilating
insults, heavy drinking, and sullen moods are typical of the season;
policemen work around the clock.

The incongruous miseries of Christmas are a stronger brew of the same
discontent that undermines many vacations and even idle Sunday
afternoons.  Psychiatrists have observed that many people are
disillusioned by their holidays.  They go through the motions of
enthusiasm and a tiring show of gaiety, but inwardly they are dismal
and homesick.  It is partly because of their unrealistic hope for magic:  a
wonderful happy time; it is also due to the flimsiness of most
personalities--they are maintained by the familiarity of routine and
collapse in strange surroundings.

The U.S. psychoanalyst J.P. Cattell describes what he calls the holiday
syndrome as being most severe during the month before Christmas and
until a few days after New Year's.  He reported that the syndrome is
characterized by the "presence of diffuse anxiety, numerous regressive
phenomena including marked feelings of helplessness, possessiveness
and increased irritability, nostalgic or bitter rumination about holiday
experiences of youth, depressive affect and a wish for magical
resolution of problems."

Many people bear with year-long humiliations and sadness but cannot
avoid the silly hope that Christmas morning will cure it all.  The season
brings forth an inner child, a loitering Peter Pan who wants cuddling
and gets instead a hatfull of bills.  It seems appropriate to be pampered
at Christmas, but an impersonal stampede tramples quietness to death.
The discovery that Christmas is an expensive cheat, with only a flash or
two of the luster promised, creates disillusionment that silver bells can
only mock.

Some people have a clear idea of what is wrong with Christmas for
them.  One novelist, for instance, was deserted by his wife at Christmas
and a television personality buried his only daughter a few days after
she had helped him decorate a Christmas tree.  Neither could tolerate
holly and tinsel stars afterwards.  A young mother of three whose
critical inlaws visited for six weeks every Christmas eventually detested
the entire season.  An engineer felt a chill every Christmas that was the
residue of his mother's icey insistence that he open his gifts alone in his
room and stay there until dinner.  A man who was raised in an
orphanage was depressed every Christmas because his children never
seemed grateful enough for his bounty.

The North American accent on gift exchanging at Christmas is believed
to account for much of the seasonal blues.  To a child's mind--and
many an adult's as well--the quantity and quality of gifts received is the
tangible evidence of how much he is loved.  Friends who receive more
and better gifts are envied because they must be valued more.  A
brother or sister getting a more lavish present is a disaster.  For this
reason, even mature people feel a droop in spirits as the last gift is
unwrapped, while young children are inclined to protest violently.

The emotional involvement in gift giving is such that people who are
unable to love their families because of their own inadequacies tend to
give luxurious presents.  By going into debt for copious gifts, they
punish themselves satisfyingly and their consciences are calmed for
awhile.

Christmas accordingly can be an economic calamity.  Instead of sugar
plums, many heads are filled with a dance of creditors while panic in its
tutu waits in the wings.  The financial demands of the gifts, tips to
tradesmen, extra food and drink, cards and stamps, Christmas trees and
extension cords, all crumple the sense of safety many find in a working
budget.  The parent knows the naked horror, as the children pipe
"Silent Night."

Many are reminded by the hysteria of Christmas of the potlatch
customs of some West Coast Indians, who destroy their enemies by
loading them with gifts and food.  The guests of honor are required to
return the ceremony with even more sumptuous gifts and food, thus
wrecking their resources if they comply or plunging them into disgrace
if the don't.  Christmas gift giving similarly is becoming a persecution
for many people:  there is a mutually ruinous trend on this continent to
give back a slightly better gift than was received.

But worry over debt and disgrace is only part of the disharmony of
Christmas.  Some scientists, notably Dr. Jones, suspect that a primitive
identification with the sun affects all mankind, so that the waning of
the winter sun rekindles the primitive fear that human powers are
weakening as well.

Some of the responsibility for Christmas depression must then lie with
early Christians who chose December 25 as Christ's birthday because
this was the date of the most widely celebrated of pagan festivals and
therefore eased conversion.  Ardent sun-worshipers in man's early
history believed that the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year,
was the date on which the old sun died and a new one was born.  They
therefore celebrated giddily, with plentiful food an drink, in their best
attire, fires lit to support the burgeoning young sun.  The Romans
ornamented their homes with wreaths and exchanged gifts and
hospitality.  The Druids gathered mistletoe and the Saxons holly and
ivy.

More than there hundred years after the death of Christ, many of the
new church's followers were distressed that Jesus was still regarded as
a minor figure, of negligible importance next to his father.  To elevate
his reputation, they decided to mark his birth date with a festival.  The
actual date is debatable (most scholars place it in the spring) so the
ancient Christians tried several dates before settling on the day of the
feast to the sun, deemed appropriate since it already celebrated a birth.

It was a technique of the time to winnow non-believers into Christianity
by duplicating their favorite holidays.  The feast of Epiphany, for
instance, takes place on the day that Egyptians used to mark the virgin
birth of their god Aeon.  The festival of the goddess Diana was replaced
with the Assumption of the Virgin and the Celtic feast of the dead
became All Souls' Day.  Occasionally Christians revolt against the
bawdy beginnings of their most sacred days:  an act of English
Parliament in 1644 abolished Christmas as "a heathen festival" but the
law proved so unpopular that the holiday was reinstated promptly
when Charles II took the throne.

Similarly, the Jewish ceremonial lighting of candles during Chanukah
bears the imprint of pagan sun-worshiping.  The eight days of
Chanukah have many points of resemblance to the Roman Saturnalia,
also a festival of good will and rejoicing which was originally observed
on December 19 and later extended so that it lasted seven days.
Chanukah, the happiest of all Jewish ceremonial days, celebrates the
victory of a Jewish tribe, the Maccabees, in history's first war of
principle.

The selection of deep, dark, cold winter for festivities sets up a conflict
that adds to the seasonal muddle of emotions.  All by themselves, days
of brief sunshine can induce melancholy.  So does the imminence of the
year's end--they dying of time, years running out, potency running out,
life running out.

In addition to these despondent thoughts, North American Jews often
find Chanukah a time of painful yielding.  Their holiday is less
spectacular that the gaudy Christian Christmas and the comparison is
distressing to their children.  To offset this, some Jewish parents
decorate a tree--wryly calling it a Chanukah bush--and put presents
beneath it.  These concessions shame the devout, who are shocked at
the hypocrisy, and also trouble the parents who practice them because
the suggestion of disloyalty is unavoidable.

But the deepest and most serious depressions of the season, some of
them dipping into mental illness, are those which are the legacy of a
childhood jealousy.  Some doctors have discovered that Christians
under psychoanalysis will reveal an unconscious and corrosive envy of
the infant Christ, who receives homage, love and attention and cannot
be competed against.  Adults who long for the mothering they missed
feel a rage they dare not acknowledge at reproductions of the nativity
scene, with a tender and adoring Mary bent over her baby.

Christmas in fact celebrates world-wide love for an infant, while it is the
lot of many modern babies to have very little of it.  The disparity is
particularly galling to the unloved at Christmas.  The humbug of the
season for them is not the commercialism but the reminder of their own
insufficient mothering.

The childishness of the merrymaking associated with Christmas lulls
some people into a suspension of reality.  They give themselves an orgy
of candy and late nights and a good time, at the expense of their
normal standards.  Not many can regress into thoughtless,
consequenceless childhood and still keep alert the internal watchman
who knows from experience that pipers have the strongest union in the
world and always get their pay.  The pull between the intoxicant of self-
indulgence and wisdom that accrues from remorse is never so weighted
on the side of abandon as during those darkest days of winter in late
December.

The Christmas-Chanukah observances, however, cannot in themselves
impose an untypical mood, but they may release the stranger within
every person.  The thumb of conscience is able to squelch a good deal
of lunacy, cupidity and venom during ordinary days and ordinary
tastes, but at holiday time the conscience can be bought off with
excuses and malice pops out, and envy, and fury, and the realization of
loneliness.  One of the side-effects is an aroused sexual appetite and an
interest in aberration.

Sandor Ferenczi, the brilliant Hungarian psychoanalyst, was interested
in the phenomenon of holiday depression.  He noted that the loosening
of external and internal restrictions is frightening to many people,
causing them to feel anxious, despondent, restive and ill.  The period
surrounding Chanukah, Christmas and New Year's Day is the annual
spree of the personality, during which spontaneity and exuberance are
encouraged.  As a result it can exert a most disastrous effect on people
who are sure of themselves only when they are being ruled by routine.
Dr Jules Eisenbud, a New York psychoanalyst, observed in a paper,
"Negative Reactions to Christmas," that the season permits "social
sanction to forms of enjoyment which at other times must be held to a
judicious minimum."  Another psychoanalyst, Dr. L. Bruce Boyer,
added, "It is to be expected that the degree of neurotic response to such
an intense holiday release would be frequent and severe."

Psychiatrists are collecting an interesting dossier of holiday syndrome
case histories.  One of them describes a woman engineer who was an
exhibitionist and harshly aggressive because she constantly was
convinced that she wasn't wanted.  Christmas was a special hell time
for her.  "I used to feel that if I didn't find something wonderful that
Christmas, I'd fine it another," she told her doctor.  The "something
wonderful" was a talisman, some demonstration of love that could
penetrate her skepticism.  Each Christmas she became more devastated
by its absence.

Another woman expressed hatred of her preferred brother regularly
every Christmas, a depth of malevolence that never failed to surprise
and upset her.  A psychiatrist discovered that her recollection of the
favoritism shown her brother was always refreshed at Christmas, a time
when her parents gave him elaborate, expensive gifts and gave her
meager things.

A department store buyer who also grew up with a much favored
brother became ruthless in her business relationships with men during
the Christmas season an twice was fired because of it.  Her doctor
found that she once had asked Santa Claus to turn her into a boy so her
parents would like her better.  The collapse of her hope left her with an
annual vendetta against the masculine sex.

A salesman who loathed Christmas intensely was able to trace it to an
event that occurred when he was nine years old.  He discovered a new
bicycle hidden behind his house.  Since he had been begging his
parents for a bike, he assumed that he had stumbled on his Christmas
gift and ecstatically awaited December 25.  The bicycle that morning
went to his handsomer and more clever brother.  The man never
forgave Christmas for the heartbreak he endured; the pangs returned
vividly every season.

A strongly religious woman went to a psychiatrist in horror when she
realized that every Christmas she was hating Christmas more and more.
She was blaming the infant, it turned out, for her own emotionally
barren childhood.  A beautiful young girl began to quarrel hotly with
her fiance at Christmas.  The cause was traced to the fact that Christmas
had been the time when she felt most bitterly deprived of her father,
who had deserted the family when she was small.  Christmas served to
remind her that men could be deceitful, that they had power to hurt
women.

The Utah psychiatrists studied the case of a man who was so wretched
in his home town at Christmas that he annually fled to a nudist camp,
the farthest extreme from normal yuletide that he could invent.  A
father, otherwise a responsible citizen, passed bad checks every
Christmas.  Another, who always delighted his family with his
thoughtfulness on their birthdays and anniversaries, flatly refused to
buy anyone a Christmas gift at all.  A divorcee was able to endure her
isolation every other month but December--Christmas had been
sentimental in her family.  She regularly wept throughout the entire
day and broke out in hives.

Some people for whom Christmas has no especially unpleasant
associations nevertheless detest the season.  In some cases, it is because
the strain of household upheaval is too much for the orderliness of their
natures.  Their homes seem unfamiliar, decked out with once-a-year
ornaments and shifted furniture and they accordingly feel disturbed and
vaguely worried.  Children frequently become ill at Christmas,
succumbing gladly to whatever infection they can pick up rather than
face the uneven mealtimes and extra visitors.

Whatever causes it--lack of sunshine, childhood jealousy, confusion, old
wounds, or apprehensions because the lid is off--the holiday syndrome
is now attracting the medical attention it deserves.  The chief benefit so
far is that many people are enormously relieved to find that they are
not unsociable freaks because they dread Christmas but rather are being
quite normal.

As a result of the new acceptance of anti-Christmas spirit, many families
have exchanged techniques for making the season more tolerable.
Some have stopped sending out Christmas cards, making a straight
donation of the money saved to UNICEF, or retarded or crippled
children, or CARE packages.  It takes a few years to complete the job,
but eventually they notify all their relatives, friends and acquaintances
that they no longer send cards.

A musician with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra had a family
conference one autumn and it was agreed that each person would
receive only one gift at Christmas--the resultant savings would go to
impoverished families in Europe.  A Fredericton, New Brunswick,
industrialist and his wife gave each other an unusual gift:  they adopted
an eleven-year-old Korean boy through the Foster Parent's Plan.

On that same Christmas, a Canadian priest, Father Murray Abraham,
wrote a powerful poem, printed in the Canadian Messenger of the
Sacred Heart.  He interspersed his observations between lines of one of
Pope John XXIII's pronouncements.  Called "Pacem in Terris," it
contained in part:

"Every human being has the right to life."

      I see twins born in Singell,
      tiny, brown, Nepali towns,
      cradled in the coarse, cracked grimy hands
            of a coolie woman,
      laid on a blanket crawling with filth,
      laid on a mud floor, clammy and cold, doomed to death
      they lie there panting their first, precious breath.

"Every human being has the right to physical integrity."

      I see beggars swarming around me like floes
      in station after station across sweating India,
      clutching at my arm, grovelling before me
      twisted limbs, sightless eyes, rotting bodies,
            stinking sores.
      My heart aches; my stomach is sick!

"Every human being has the right to security whenever he is deprive of
the means of subsistence as a result of circumstances beyond his
control."

      I see crowds of coolies, standing in the
            cement shed,
      watching the monsoon rain with blank, bitter eyes,
      rain--hour after hour after hour,
      every hour of rain, an hour less pay, an
            hour more hunger.
      It is raining pain.
      . . .Oh God! the sights I have seen! the sounds I
            have heard!
      And in the West
      the sights I have seen? the sounds I have heard?

      Merry Christmas!

      I see stores gaudy with gifts, crammed with
            crowds
      packed with the nerve-racking noise, the
            clatter, the chatter, the clang
            of cash-registers, the clickety-
            clack of toys
      and underneath and above and in and through and
            around it all a song:  beautiful
            and blasphemous
      "Silent Night, Holy Night; All is calm, all
            is bright."

      Merry Christmas!

      I see the words of Time (or is it Eternity?)
            of Life (or is it Death?)
      "Four billion dollars spent. . . ."
      Four one Christmas day
      For two hundred million overfed Americans,
      more than all the help given over ten years
      for four hundred million underfed Indians.  O
            God! O God!

      Gentle John, Shepherd John,
      Call us with your shepherd's voice.
      lead us out of mockery, out of mean,
            meaningless mockery,
      Lead us away from the Christmas tree.
      Lead us back to the Christmas cave.
      Christmas is God born poor,
      homeless,
      cold, rejected,
      If we have gifts to give,teach us to
            give to the poor,
      the homeless,
      the clod,
      the rejected.

      Christ is the starving beggar on the
            streets of Calcutta.
      Christ is the weeping widow in the slums
            of Rio de Janeiro.
      Christ is the child crying, crying in
            the hovels of Cairo.
      Lead us back to Christ, gentle shepherd
            John.
      Christ needs us.
      He brought peace to us, let us now bring
            peace to him.
      "Pacem in Terris."  Amen.  Amen

Father Abraham's protest has millions of sympathizers of every faith.
In a hungry world, the North American Christmas-Chanukah has
become indecent.  Men and women distressed by the fever and
acceleration and false camaraderie of the season have been on
composed retreat these past few years.  They have soothed themselves
by forgiving the injustices of Christmases Past and expecting no
miracles in Christmases Future.  There is a trend toward more gentle
family celebrations, with simpler trimmings and true warmth.  The find
that with the hustle and greed removed, the pagan season has worth
again:  a sense of holiness returns, and peace, and even joy.

--Adapted from "Love, Hate, Fear, Anger and Other Lively Emotions."
  June Callwood, 1964.
Newsgroups: alt.suicide.holiday