red, green, and blue

Music: Japancakes: Sleepy Strange (2008)

In year's past I've written about how the hype-machineries of consumer culture (that is, the mainstream news media, which have supplanted commercials and sentimental Hollywood holiday films as the guiding generation of guilt-trippers) amplify familial fantasy to such impossible perfections and sublime sentimentalities that even the most contented and easy-going of the family-minded must suffer a little Christmas PTS.

All that airport anticipation and excitement is difficult to reconcile with the reality of holiday homecomings: it's not like the movies or the commercials when you're "all grown up." Today was a nice and varied day that started with welcomed coffee and a visit to the nursing home, and ended with cooking and a fight with my mother about how I am "condescending" when I ask her to explain what she means when she says "Obama is a socialist!" I love my mama, I'm a mama's boy, to be sure, but if you question any claim like this---which is commonly heard in the Gunn homeland---you're a "brainwashed liberal."

Political hostilities aside, it's truly nice to be home, to see my folks, my extended family, to visit with a friend or two. This is the joy of the holiday. But that joy is also mingled with news of ill tidings and with a visit to the nursing home to see my beloved grandmother.

The nursing home is where people go to wait for death. Assisting living is a different story. The home---where everyone is put into wheelchairs whether they can walk or not---is not my kind of place. It smells like putrid flesh; something fetid in that Cloroxed corner this way comes. "Don't let Miss Mary grab you," I was warned by my mother as we walked to Grany's room. "She's got an iron grip and she won't let you go." This old woman with a gentle face, once she has you, apparently says only two things to you while she has you imprisoned: "I gotta pee" or "I caiynnnt."

Granny today wasn't "at herself." She was not there. She stares off into space. Always a bigger boned woman, she's now a slight 110---really, truly something of a shadow. She didn't know me this time. She's always recognized me in years past; not today. Empty eyes.

This is what holidays are often about for the folks celebrating it: hanging on to the living, mourning the dead or dying. And babies (festivus, you see). We sat with Granny in the cafeteria awaiting the coming meal (fish sticks!). The Spelman College Glee Club was on a huge LCD television singing holiday songs. It was nice, but one couldn't beat-back the thought that Granny really didn't hear much of anything, that we were wheeling her about in the hope she's "in there" somewhere registering our love.

When I see Granny---or walk into the home---it's often difficult not to be moved to cry. I've gotten much better over the years, but it's still hard to deal with---especially at Christmas, when so much work goes into reminding those who are alone that they are not alone.

Well, I'm rambling. Tonight Santa comes, this time as a son who has scored a few nice things for the folks. Another Santa came today, in the form of a mum in a housecoat, and delivered a lovely food processer a day early (so we could make pie crust).

We have fun. But at times we are sad together too. It seems to me a little of that sadness is what the holiday is about; maybe I am wrong and folks experience holiday very differently out there. But sadness comes with the territory for Christmas once one turns, I dunno, 16? It's a shame in our culture we are caused to pile guilt on top of our sadnesses, guilt because we are not allowed to feel sad on Christmas.

I'm about to cut out the light, right after I post this. I feel sad, but also happy. That's what holidays usually feel like, a little of column A, and a little of column A. Red, Green, and Blue.