“Leave the planet, that’s what!”

The retort is barbed, I know, but I have a record for being cranky on this subject, and besides, how many good answers are there to a question like, “What do you want to do for Christmas this year?”

Yes, I have a problem with this season, and I have had for the past three times that it has flown unsolicited at my face.  I used to enjoy Christmas well enough—okay, I used to enjoy it a lot—but it ain’t so any more, and my theory is this:  Christmas is like democracy—it works fine on a full belly, but if your life isn’t perfect or you think too much, Christmas can become something to flee, like a flood, or a religious riot.  It’s difficult to describe if you haven’t been there, but I actually knew this even back in my happy years, because I had a short career as an ambulance driver, and I’ve picked up the suicides, and the drug overdoses.  It’s a known phenomenon.  People simply kill themselves more during the holidays, and there’s no other explanation for it. ‘Tis the season, that’s all.  The holidays are tough for people in transition.  They’re very tough.

Two and a half years ago my marriage broke up, and when the first Christmas hit, my response could only be called “going into hiding.”  Not four people knew the home number at my new rented studio house, and I kept it that way.  I hunkered in the little place, and it seemed that the flimsy walls shook beneath the gales of good tidings as Christmas ranted and raged outdoors.  I listened to the tolling of all the things my life had no more.  Family!  Togetherness!  Joy to the world, for heaven’s sake!  The screaming insipid voices were trying to bodily drag me back into a memory that would surely kill me if it laid hands on me.  I could not allow it, it was as simple as that.  A survival issue.  So I hunkered. I pulled the curtains and listened to the window panes rattle.  And then all the ambulance calls came back to me.  Suddenly I remembered every damned one of them.  So this is what it’s like, I thought.  This is what Christmas is like for the rest of us.  God, it hurts.

The second Christmas, I took a different approach.  Figuring the darkness would defeat me in the end anyway, I took a stroll directly into it.  I did this by accepting a volunteer job on the streets of a derelict, homeless neighborhood in a nearby town where I used to avoid even driving.  I wandered the streets of the dark side, on foot, up close and personal.  The tarps slung across the abandoned doorways now had people behind them, people I knew;  the hollow-eyed faces now had names; behind each tragedy of circumstance there was now a story.  I handed out food and clothing, listened to the people, talked to them on the rare occasion that I had something useful to say.  I learned to do needle exchange with the junkies, to try to keep AIDS from killing them long enough for them to save their own lives.  Now, the nameless sorrows of our existence were before me and around me—my interaction with the darkness was intimate.  I had entered a one-on-one relationship with my most feared enemy.

Did it help?  Did it make me happy by putting everything in perspective and pointing out my own blessings?  Sorry, no.  I wish our problems were that simple.  But I did feel that I was helping, in some small but irrevocable way.  And there was something else, too.  Each night that I was out there, I enjoyed a freedom that I enjoyed nowhere else.  For you see, on those streets, there’s no such thing as Christmas.

Funny thing is, though, I would keep doing this work long after the holidays had passed.  It’s been a year now, and every Friday night I’m out there, doing a job I can’t quite describe for reasons I can’t quite explain.  I looked around recently and discovered that the holidays were upon me again, and felt again the forces of cynicism within myself.  And friends were asking me, “Randy, is every Christmas going to do this to you for the rest of your life?  When are you going to come to terms with this holiday?”

Three weeks ago, the folks I do this outreach with decided to do a toy drive for some kids we know.  How could I help?  Well gee, I said, hoping to get off easy, I work at a large company; I guess I could send out an E-mail to all the employees, soliciting donations.  Cool, everyone said, and I was thinking, Right!  Soliciting help for dope fiends ought to go over just great in a large, conservative, white-collar corporation.  Don’t hold your breath, folks.  Warm and secure in my dark view of us all, and no more enamored of the project than I was of the holidays in general, I went ahead and pitched it, and I pitched it straight.  Here’s what blipped their terminals Monday morning:

People,

            I am soliciting toys for a small and special toy drive.  While I know many of you are already helping our company through its efforts with the Salvation Army, I would like you to read on and learn about some children in a very different situation.

            Through the local County AIDS Project, I am working with people in very difficult circumstances indeed.  Most are intravenous drug users (and hence at high risk for AIDS), and since this makes them necessarily live outside the law, they don’t dare show up at government agencies for help.  They are not accounted for in any of the figures we read, and are deeply mistrustful of any agencies or organizations that might be interested in helping.  Many are homeless.  The closest they come to surfacing is when they occasionally get arrested for their drug use.  They are an invisible subculture.  And they have children.

            Our toy drive is a very small and very personal one.  There are thirty-plus of these children whom we know, and can reach with some Christmas presents.  I will distribute them personally.  They need not be wrapped, and need not even be new.

            Please help.  Thanks.

I look back now at the memory of sending that E-mail as if through a strange, marbled pane of glass, as if looking at my last unsuspecting act before a sudden, life-changing event.  Here are some of the ways things are profoundly different for me now:  I now have no more empty boxes in my garage.  I now have no more space on my office floor or in my pick-up truck bed.  I now get no work done when I show up at the company that employs me because I spend all my time fielding phone calls and e-mail from coworkers, and accepting their donations.  For a week I have been receiving toys by the bagful and the boxful.  I have been receiving old toys and new toys.  I have also been receiving clothes.  I have also been receiving money.  My truck was such a Santa’s sleigh on Friday night when I drove in that we had to off-load the stuff we didn’t have room for to a nearby homeless shelter in the neighborhood.  And it is still coming in.

So, humbled and changed, I am taking keyboard in hand to announce to my community—and to myself—that I think I have come to terms with this holiday.  It is not the first time I have badly misjudged humanity, and it is unlikely to be the last.  But now as the coming years roll by, I will be able to say that on at least one Christmas in this smudged and fractured life, I received a very important gift, and the gift was a lesson, and the lesson was this:  There are good people out there.  A lot of them.  And there is joy.

Even in this heart.

Merry Christmas, everyone.