Month: December 2020

In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was a year ago, more or less. By that, I don’t actually mean the fact that I had the opportunity to go to Brazil for a comic convention that turned out to be a genuinely incredible trip, surprisingly enough — although it really was a wonderful experience, and one that I hope to repeat at a time when the world isn’t gripped by a pandemic that’s peaking again at levels that are horrific to even consider — but, as strange as it may be, what it felt like to come back after that trip.

I’ll preface all of this by telling you that I was, as the saying goes, tired and emotional when the plane landed in Portland; not only had I just spent a busy week working a comic convention in a country where the time difference from where I normally was, was notable, but I’d also just spent a full 24 hours traveling back from there, with very little sleep actually achieved on the plane. I was, to be blunt, exhausted, which might explain some of the feelings I went through as I sat in the drive back from the airport, confused and upset that, somehow, the holiday season had started without me.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the holidays; they’ve always felt like the perfect end to the eleven months that have preceded them, as I entirely buy into the sentimentality and the aesthetic of the time, believing that, yes, it really is the most wonderful time of the year. Yet, when I looked out the window of the car and saw that, while I had been away, Portland had decked its metaphorical halls with decorations and garish cheer, I felt… oddly betrayed.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see decorations; I really did, I swear. But I felt as if they’d happened without me, and that I’d missed something important in a way that I couldn’t properly explain. Added to that, I missed the weird nostalgic, comforting moment of returning from a period away and seeing everything exactly as I’d left it. Things weren’t as I left them. How could Portland do this to me?

As I said, there was exhaustion and a sleep-deprived lack of logic at play in my feelings of disappointment and betrayal; I know in retrospect just how ridiculous I was being… but I can’t deny that I take a small measure of comfort this year being in town for the first week of December, and being here as the holidays start this time around.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the song goes. Or, at least, we’ve made it to the part of the year when the decorations can go up and we can start listening to the many, many holiday songs I have in my collection. Either way, it’s a marvelously comforting time of year for me, even if I’m not quite ready to go as far as Andy Williams does when he declares it “the most! Wonderful tiiiiiiiiime of the yeaaaaaar.” (Actually, it may be, although I also feel pretty strongly about fall.)

It’s December, is what I’m saying.

With 2020 being the surreal, difficult experience that it’s been, just the simple fact that we’ve made it here feels almost unlikely in and of itself, to be honest. If it wasn’t for the weather, you could probably convince me that we’re still only midway through the year, the way time has stretched out and felt elastic and meaningless, for one thing; is it really eight months since I found out I was losing my Wired gig? How can that be true? What happened to all the traditional landmarks that happen across the year to remind us that we’re moving forward?

Of course, it’s also been the kind of year that’s underscored how ridiculous the notion of things changing purely because of time moving on actually is; just because we’re in the last month of the year doesn’t really mean anything in the big picture — we will, more than likely, still be living quarantine lives for much of next year, and there’s not even the transition of Presidential power until the end of January. Things aren’t going to significantly shift when we put away the Advent Calendar and the tree.

Yet, bringing those things out, celebrating this time of year and taking part in everything surrounding it, still matters to me, despite the logic and the knowing better. There’s still comfort and security and happiness to be found there, for me, in the music and the decorations and traditions old and new. The holiday season is, at heart, about hope and kindness, and that’s what I find myself focusing on over everything else — a hope that, against logic, perhaps, we can be in a kinder world at least for the next month.