Mike Vargo: The Holiday Rant

Jacob Marley is still dead. But he still haunts the living, and in a dream he told me I would be visited by three spirits: Ronald McDonald, the pale and bulbous Pillsbury Doughboy, and Sinclair Oil’s Dino — the green brontosaurus who for many years has symbolized fossil fuel. 

These three might visit your home, too. McDonald, Doughboy, and Dino are among the gigantic, gaseous balloons that will float in the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving morning. If you have a TV tuned in while you wrestle a dead turkey into the oven, they’ll come streaming into your space. Along with their fellow corporate gasbags, they are the heralds chosen to deliver a foreboding message. The holiday season has officially come. 

And as the soothsayer said to Caesar on the morning of the Ides of March: Ay, but not gone. 

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Of course Turkey Day is only the start of the gauntlet. The first of a trifecta of fests that test us and tell us who we are. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve celebrate the three great indulgences of our culture: overeating, overspending, and getting overly intoxicated. 

The unifying theme is excess. I omit the adjective “wretched” because it is superfluous, excessive, and writers shouldn’t be that way. But sometimes I can’t refrain from going over the top, because over the top is where the situation is. 

In one of my writing gigs I cover the performing arts. This puts me on email lists for promo announcements, like the one sent recently by our city’s ballet company. The company says its production of The Nutcracker — an extravagant Christmas ballet, made more extravagant — will feature “over 150 costumes, 1,500 costume accessories and more than 100 artists … [as well as] a Christmas tree that grows to 15 times its size, sparkling snow and more than 30 sleight-of-hand tricks created by a professional magician …” 

Every year, The Nutcracker draws crowds of people who normally aren’t ballet fans. Many bring their children. The kids can learn what the Christmas tradition really means. 

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Please don’t get me wrong. I am not a bah-humbug person. At my house we do the holidays and we do them in style. Speaking of trees, I even insist on buying a real, live tree. Actually, a real dead tree. I find that I enjoy bringing out the strings of lights and the boxes of baubles, and decorating the corpse. Perhaps the process awakens some atavistic ritual-sense, which could be traced back to the elaborate burial practices of ancient times. 

Sometimes I imagine the funerary artists of that era decorating a deceased pharaoh or emperor, and muttering while they work. So the little prick thought he was a god? All right, we’ll make him look like one. More than he ever looked when he used to strut his slimy ass around like a whore with bad makeup.

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Sorry. Writing has its perils. One can let the mind run amuck. Just as the holiday season has perils that can lead the mind to run amuck. During what is supposed to be a joyous time, bouts of depression, anger, and frustration are common. For me, something happens which I struggle to describe. Here is how it goes:

I partake in the rituals, being careful not to let them get to me. I have learned, for instance, that when people ask “Are you ready for Christmas?” like a preacher asking if I am ready for Judgment Day, the question doesn’t have to spook my self-worth. I will be as ready as I turn out to be and it is what it is. 

Therefore I sail into the holidays on a fairly even keel. Enjoying the people around me, most of them. Trying to enjoy whatever presents itself to be enjoyed. If a lot of it is superficial, that’s OK, for I am sailing the surface, right? But then the refrain of a grunge-rock song from the 1990s plays in my head. “Everything Zen” is the song. In response to the notion that everything is Zen, the singer repeatedly snarls “I don’t think so.” 

And therein lies the flaw in the ointment. Beneath the enjoyment I feel an undercurrent of unease. Of existential dread, I would venture to say. There are the recurring flashes of Russian-novel moments: Pavel Pavlovich realized that his entire life had been a mistake. The dreadful, lost-in-a-void feeling of wondering what in Marley’s name we are doing anyhow; the sense that something essential is being missed. 

Bottom line, the rituals are pleasant enough but the holidays are conceptually flawed. Thanksgiving, in every respect from the Macy’s rollout to the Detroit Lions game to the enormous dinner, has either evolved into or been designed as a day that can be navigated without an inkling of an attitude of gratitude. Christmas has become the holiday that eats everything, the holiday of demands. Including the demand that one should shift psychic gears in order to be cheerful and benevolent for the occasion. (Which raises a question. Why not have a society that’s cheerful and benevolent all the time?)

And New Year’s Eve, the crowning blow — despite the parties, and despite all tomorrow’s promises — evaporates to essentially nothing. An arbitrary blip in the calendar. It doesn’t really mark the coming of anything new, or the end of anything old. No springtime or harvest is close at hand. We don’t celebrate it with collective acts of forgiveness, or a letting go of animosity, or the canceling of debts and regrets. We don’t christen the new year with new public policies or initiatives. We go back to work and back to school in the perpetual hangover of business as usual.

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Long ago, when I was young and my parents were alive, they taught me an old Slovak custom. On New Year’s Eve, place a pile of coins outside your front door. The pile can be small but the coins should be big: silver dollars and half-dollars will give you the heft and the shine you want. Then, right after the stroke of midnight, you fetch the coins and carry them inside. The point is to symbolically enact a good omen. You’re starting the new year by bringing in money. Big money. 

The problem is that I forget to fetch the coins. I’ll notice them much later, in daylight, when I’m outdoors for some reason and there they are, where I left them, on the little table at the corner of the front porch. When I see that, my heart sinks. Although I know the custom is just a superstition, I also know that my mind tends to work metaphorically, and once again I have done the wrong metaphor. I’ve set the tone for another year by leaving money on the table. Leaving potential unfulfilled, leaving the treasures of life untapped. 

But there’s hope! This time I can program the iPhone to ring a reminder alarm at 12:01 a.m., which isn’t “right after” midnight but close. Then we’ll see how it goes. Reinvention of the self and the world in baby steps. Oh yeah: sounds like a plan. Happy holidays. 

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Copyright 2023 Mike Vargo

Mike Vargo is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh.