I’ve never been a big holiday person. I used to think there was something lame about being too into the holidays. Holidays were just another day, right? And totally arbitrary?
I’ve always had—if you couldn’t tell—a strong inner cynic. The guy just rolls his eyes at everything.
But if you start with cynicism, it’s hard to get anywhere else. If cynicism is your point of departure, then embracing the “holiday spirit” can feel tantamount to a betrayal of self.
I’ve spent a few years now chipping away at this personal puzzle.
I realized, in the past few years, that being excited about anything requires vulnerability. And vulnerability doesn’t come easy to a cynic, who can too easily imagine all their fellow cynics out there rolling their eyes at their excitement.
This is to say that the holidays haven’t been my favorite time of the year.
(I just flashed back on a memory from middle school where a casually expressed dislike for the song “Silver Bells” during a school field trip metastasized into an all-bus singalong. My holiday season cynicism uncovered, I felt I had no choice but to lean into the bit—mugging irritation, hands over my ears, that sort of thing.)
So when my wife and I bought a house a few years ago, I faced—after our first Thanksgiving in the house—a dilemma familiar to any sorta Christian-identifying homeowner: putting up the Christmas lights.
The first and biggest question: When?
The cynic in me pushed against the Friday-after-Thanksgiving timetable, which felt too much like how pumpkins start appearing outside the supermarket the Tuesday after Labor Day. We settled on early December that first year.
The second question—more of a bundle of questions—How?
How many lights? How should we hang them? How do you attach lights to the roof? To the gutter? To the back fence? How do you position and stake the blow-up Santa in the front yard?
I found it infuriating, to be honest. The worst place to get pissed off and irritated is on the roof of your house, leaning out over the second story gable, 25 feet of space between me and the concrete driveway below—but there we were! I was a miserable little Grinch up there, fumbling with the multicolored strand of LEDs, considering whether or not a 25-foot drop would render them broken and un-string-able.
So what changed?
Part of it was marital concord—unlike me, my wife is no cynic about the holidays. Another part had to do with the note received from a few neighborhood kids, asking (very sweetly!) for people put holiday lights up.
But it’s also that I’ve tired of the cynicism. I’ve tired of the needless hand-wringing over “commercialization” (not that this isn’t a real and vital thing to consider—but let’s be reasonable about how bent out of shape we get over it). I’ve tired of the eye-rolling persona I feel compelled by my misplaced upper-crust New Englander reserve to take on.
It’s just more fun to be excited about holiday lights. The only people who roll their eyes about holiday lights are the cynics.
The lights, by the way, are already up, waiting to be plugged in at the end of this week.
Taylor Coe 