Welcome to Bittersweet Pl. 🏚️
And Happy Boxing Day! According to Wikipedia, “This custom is linked to an older British tradition in which the servants of the wealthy were allowed the next day to visit their families since they would have had to serve their masters on Christmas Day.”
Pretty fucked up stuff if you ask me, but I hope our friends in the UK and the broader Commonwealth are enjoying their day of rest.
Whatever holidays you just finished celebrating, are currently celebrating, or are yet to celebrate, know that the Place sends glad tidings to you and your loved ones. Deeper than our brains can go exists a need to be close to warmth, both tactile and love-stoked.
Simply like and subscribe to secure your place around the hearth.
In high school and college, my holiday routine centered on the text.
Traditionally, it contained some sort of commentary or quasi-awakening meant to prove my spiritual bonafides. (I’d share passages, but they’re galling to me now.) The gist was: Christ loves you and, wow, we’re all developing sexually and emotionally at such a staggering rate!
And is this not the crux of most high school experiences? —> “Look at me, look at me, I am a different, never-before-seen kind of person vaguely attempting to get laid.”
I was doing my best, but I was also smoking cigarillos pretty often at the time. Not even replacing the innards with dirt weed. There was much for me to learn about right, wrong, and tobacco.
It’s not an embellishment when I say the text would go out to 200+ people, copy-pasted over and over on an LG VX5400 smartphone, in a process that would take several hours to complete. I’d spend large portions of the day away from family and friends, agonizing over the profundity of my sermon. “But, good news! It’s Christmas: the birthday of a true King!”
When I got an iPhone it just wasn’t the same. Perhaps the lack of self-flagellation hollowed out the experience. Maybe I recognized my peers had stopped getting scripture tattoos after hallucinatory camp experiences. Either way, it ended. And it’s better this way. Less huff and puff. Fewer canonical inconsistencies.
But there’s something there, right? Sermons, toasts, proposals, archangels, George Bailey. This time of year, everyone’s trying to spit out something with meaning. It’s the season for monologuing.
Human beings are desperate for endings to produce overarching, flattering discoveries about their lives and what better time for it than the religious high before the new year?
Shouldn’t 2024 say something about my family? Our worthiness? Our magnanimity to bring this busted dog off the streets and give it a roof and a bowl and a lifetime of gristle from our very own plates?
On Christmas Eve, the pastor at my parents’ church said we ride because “God put on skin.” And, hey brother, I applaud the wordplay. That same day, my sister told me a patient at her work tried to kill himself with a spork.
For years, I thought I could wrap my arms around this season and send a message that connected with everyone. But that’s impossible. Our lives are dreams and nightmares, maybe both, others know little about.
I can only dog ear this chapter and assume it’s still being written.
Keep saying “I love you” and “I’m sorry,” and try to call instead of text.
Legendary Post of the Week:
“Every day is a miracle, not to mention a threat.” - Mark Jacob Lenderman