Author: Graeme McMillan

It is, as the song goes, beginning to look a lot like Christmas, which means what it always does at this time of year: me overthinking my attachment to the holidays.

That’s being purposefully glib, but the truth of the matter is that, at least once every December, I tend to find myself pausing amidst so much mental tinsel and fairy lights and wondering just why this time of year makes me so happy. Surely, I ask myself, there’s more to it than just taking the word of noted entertainer Andy Williams when he confidently declares that this is the most wonderful time of the year? There has to be.

That said, I don’t quite know what that “more” might actually be. I’m sure that nostalgia plays no small role here; I have a vague, lazy theory that this time of year is as much about nostalgia as it is anything else, after all. But, while it’s true that I had some wonderful Christmases as a kid, I’m not sure that I’d describe them as so wonderful as to create a lifelong attachment to the pageantry and show of the holiday season that I love so much today. So, something else, then.

Perhaps it’s the pageantry in its own right, of course. I can’t deny that I’m a sucker for the elaborate (overly elaborate, in many cases) decorations, the music all filled with aural code and repeated tropes in arrangements and lyrics alike, all of it. (I almost wrote, “the semiotics of the season,” before being forced to admit that I’m unsure about the real definition of that word.) That argument doesn’t really work, though; I don’t fall for such things in different circumstances, so surely there’s something else about this time of year that’s speaking to me in holly, jolly, tones.

I come back, repeatedly, to the sentiment of the whole thing, and my love of the idea that celebrating peace, love, kindness, and goodwill to all. It’s saccharine, it’s often insincere, but still… Just the idea that people will try to achieve that, or even lie and tell themselves that they’re trying — there’s something in there, for me. It may not be the answer for real, but it’s annually been the North Star that I’ve found myself looking to.

I missed a deadline for this blog, for the first time in almost two years, and I feel terrible about it. This isn’t an exaggeration; I had a post in draft for yesterday, but didn’t get to finish it in time — a combination of a heavier than expected workload and my brain deciding to work slower than normal being to blame — which meant that, for the first time since I restarted doing this on a regular basis, I didn’t have anything to post for one of the thrice-weekly posts.

It’s difficult to overstate quite how badly I felt about this; it was the kind of thing that stuck in my head all evening, despite the fact that I knew it wasn’t of any importance to anyone that wasn’t me. Nevertheless, I found myself wracked with guilt over it, thinking that perhaps I needed to drop everything and sit myself back down at the laptop to write something, anything to ensure that the entire day wasn’t missing a post.

(Again, no-one that isn’t me cares about this. And yet.)

Once upon a time, I had a bunch of posts lined up in advance to make sure that things like this didn’t happen; I was three weeks ahead on average, which I’m pretty sure meant that I didn’t even miss anything when I was suffering from something that was probably/possibly COVID at the start of the year.

I prided myself on that, on having a buffer of material that I could rearrange as needs be, and when that buffer slowly got eaten up as summer turned to fall — everything being so stressful and busy that I didn’t really have either the time or the inclination to write as often as I’d otherwise like — I could feel the self-imposed pressure building, knowing that I’d soon have to sit down and handle things one way or another.

As it turned out, that didn’t happen, and I missed a post.

What makes me most frustrated, I think, is the concern that this is the beginning of a slippery slope into not writing here on a regular basis. That’s the thing that I really don’t want to happen. This space has become increasingly important to me, and the idea of it going away through my own inaction is a stressful and deeply upsetting one.

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.