Falling out of like...

Like the preponderance of daisy dukes and UGGS, seemingly mutually exclusive clothing that had new york city by the cahones this temperate and tempting winter, the holiday season has, so far, been antithetical at best.

For all the Ho Ho Hos: yes. Holidays are hard when you're not hard-up. And for the hooked-line and swingers, a partner in crime is really just a cash-burn when the economy is crumbling (read: the devil wears discounts). And this year, out of nowhere, I'm caught somewhere between single and sworn so I'm not even gonna try to decipher how that factors into my temperament.

But romantic status aside, my own personal holiday season, like most of the rest of my life, has resembled a kiddie ride more than a roller coaster and yet still seems hard to navigate. Take away the dissenting aunt, the jewish factor, a little sister and the mom's-mom/dad's-dad 1-2 political polarity-- and add a few mood-stabilizers, new cousins, old friends, napping, and 17,000 empty calories and you've got, right there, the baseline in my 3 days without leaving the house (and counting).

But it still seems void of something weighty and meaningful. Maybe it's the distance between Massachusetts and Malawi... or the disparate family pockets that made for a higher frequency of emotional peaks but destroyed the amplitude of the holiday as a whole. I think, more than all of this personal mumbo-jumbo, there's an underlying current of religion that I can't hold on to. As many a jew has pointed out of late, Channuka really isn't a big deal. And Christmas, to me, isn't at all a religious testament. I know the word for that 'baby jesus meets adoring fans in a barn' scene but I can't tell you why they're up.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm falling out of like with the holidays as they've been defined for me. I think the religious facade is waning in the face of hardship- which is absurd, right? And without the public ramming religious enthusiasm into every wrinkle of my brain, without a family intact, without a land-bridge to africa, or a rented room in an NYC bar stocked with finger-food and karaoke and everyone I love in the moment, I'm losing track of WHY we do this to ourselves. WHY we engage in this over-stimulating, far too infrequent voyage to some pre-destined safe-space wherein we pay tribute to where we came from and who-all got us here... Baby jesus? Really? What could we possibly be celebrating!?! The idea that I'm celebrating something esoteric and religious is mind boggling when I spend 99% of the holidays trying to hold on to what keeps me put together. Family. Adopted, newly discovered, aging, rock-solid family.

Throw your creches to the mystics and let's just admit it. We're celebrating Kwanzaa here, folks! And next year, we're gonna do it right. We're all hitching a jumbo jet to Africa. Fo shizzle.