Holiday Blues

‘Tis the season for baking cookies and singing Christmas carols and decorating the house with pretty twinkling lights.  It’s time for gathering together with friends and family to share in the joy of each others company, for eating and cooking food that is as fattening as it is delicious.  This is the time of year where children pray for snow and everyone has that special spring in their steps.  But for many, this is also a time of extreme emotion, mood swings, fatigue and sadness. I’m one of those people this year.  I feel overwhelmed, exhausted and frequently on the edge of tears.  The holidays have always been hard, but it’s been worse since my dad’s death almost five years ago.  This year is the hardest since the first year without him.  Maybe it’s because I’m not speaking with my mother right now, so I feel orphaned.  Or maybe it’s because we’re coming up on the 5 year anniversary.   Half a decade.  That’s a long time.  Or maybe it’s because I’m stressed out over so many things.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that while I love to see the joy of the season in my child’s eyes, I wish I could do more than go through the motions and actually feel that joy for myself again.  I’m not sure how, though.   I hope that BB can’t tell how not into this whole season I am.  I don’t want him growing up and remembering that his mother was a depressed scrooge at Christmastime.  So I play Christmas music on the stereo, I tell him stories about when I used to wait up for Santa and I talk about making cookies for the neighbors (maybe next week I’ll actually make them) and I hope that BB is clueless about how I really feel.

But, I’m so angry with myself.  I have a wonderful family who loves me, a lot of really great friends, and I know that no matter how tight things may get, we’ll always have enough food to eat and a roof over our heads.  So what am I whining about?   I don’t want to feel like scrooge.  I want to feel like Tiny Tim.