047: The Over/Under on Christmas
Trillbilly Worker's Party, the end of history, being divorced and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
The Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast is hard to explain.
Their Patreon description is “a podcast about a town called Whitesburg, Kentucky”. This article describes them as “part of the loose coalition of left-wing media outlets that have sworn off civility politics in favor of a more vulgar, irreverent confrontation of power that has become known as the “Dirtbag Left.” For me, the Trillbillies are the closest thing I can get to driving around in a pickup with my best friends from high school, giggling as they crack jokes and commentate on everything from our church youth group, to our teachers’ sex lives, to the NBA draft.
Anyway, in this week’s episode, there was an exchange that was apropos of Christmas. It started with riff on the boys’ annual struggle to survive the risk of “a psychotic breakdown” before the end of the month of December.
Tarence: “You can never truly know—it’s crazy how much of life just comes down to luck and chance, I see now why you’re into gambling .”
Tom: “It’s pure.”
Tarence: “Sometimes it seems like the only way to navigate it is wagering on everything…just go around calculating the over and under.”
Tom: “I don’t even do that…on New Year’s Day, I just pretend it’s December 32—that’s the beauty of being at the end of history"
The clip is about a minute and a half long and captures most of what I feel about the Christmas holiday—how it feels like I’m both outside of time and at the end of time every single year; how it’s a struggle for sanity on the level of trying to land a plane with one engine; how it’s a total roll of the dice on whether or not it’s going to turn out well, and how hilarious and freeing it is to just give in the inevitability of catastrophic chaos.
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Every year around this time there are reminders on social media that the holidays can be hard for people—the annual voicing of solidarity and sharing of hotlines. I see these and feel sympathy, but up until recently I didn’t think these reminders applied to me. My childhood was filled with quintessentially picturesque holiday traditions: the annual trip to the snow-covered mountain to find and cut a Christmas tree; the mother/daughter matching outfits; the sound of Christmas bells ringing out of a packed church into frosty midnight air; the boisterous Christmas dinner around my grandparents’ enormous table with a dozen aunts and uncles and cousins and little cut glass salt shakers at every place setting. Every year amongst my presents there would always be at least one new book. And every year when the noise and expectations and just general angsty vibe of all the adults got to be too much, I would curl up under one of my grandmother’s crochet afghans and disappeared into a storybook world.
But later, when I was a young mom, these picture-perfect traditions took on a new quality of unmet expectations as I tried and failed to create the same kind of sumptuous beauty and stability for my own children. Part of this is because a child’s memories don’t include the fact that her parents stayed up half the night assembling a dollhouse and are subsequently exhausted when she wakes them up at dawn to see if Santa came.
Part of this was due to my own unique situation. In the early years my kids’ dad was often either on deployment or preparing to deploy, and we were always either moving into or just about to move out of a house on one military base or another, or on a college campus, or both, or camped out on a pull out bed at one or the other of our parents’ houses. Even when we had our own place, it could be a struggle. There was one Christmas in a near-empty house on Fort Drum with my sister and I hacking away at a Christmas tree trunk with a kitchen knife because it wouldn’t fit in the tree stand that we had bought. There was such desperation in it for us: my husband was in Somalia, my son wasn’t even two years old, there was about a hundred inches of snow on the ground, and my sister was leaving to fly home to Wyoming without me the next morning. We needed the Christmas tree to fit into that stand.
To make things worse, both of my marriages ended right around Christmas time, too. The first one coasted to a slow, iterative stop in a sad, bittersweet, confusion of love and regret, so that even in the hardest moments we were both filled with grace and good intentions. But even so, nothing to do with Christmas would ever really be whole again. My second marriage blazed out during the Christmas season in a cataclysm of recrimination and disappointment after several successive years of pretty bad foreshocks.
I handled all of this by reducing my expectations a little more each year. When my kids were younger, there was no way I was going to insist on things—dates, gifts, activities, travel—that would put them in the place of having to choose between their parents. I couldn’t protect them from a lot of the sadness that comes from having your parents be apart at the holiday, but not making my feelings part of their burden seemed like one thing I could do. I tried other things to protect them, too, and mostly failed. I tried to minimize the amount of extra travel they had to do—except that their father lived in Germany. I tried to create traditions as buffers against chaos—but between step parents, step children, constantly shifting schedules, moving around a lot, and not very much money, it was pretty hard to get a run streak going. We always did manage to do something special and fun around the holiday time—don’t get me wrong—but for me, anyway, things always felt precarious and contingent.
As my kids became young adults, this annual lowering of expectations became more emotionally neutral. It is nowadays a function of logistics: they have lives and responsibilities, jobs, and even their own partners now, plus the same number of grandparents, aunts, uncles as they always have. There are even more demands on their time and there are still just two of them. They are both bright, shining stars of humanity, but even supernovas can’t be everywhere at once.
This low-level precarity, worry, and loss has gone on for so long that I must have become inured to it. It wasn’t until this past September, when my childhood best friends and sister and I were having our post-pandemic (hahaha) reunion, that I even questioned what the holidays have become for me. As my sister and friends unspooled the things big and small that they do with their kids and husbands, I realized, in a stunning, emotional thunderclap kind of a way, that I don’t have any traditions.
I have the collection of hand-made, vintage, and nostalgic tree ornaments and house decorations I have carried with me around the world and innumerable, gorgeous, one-off experiences that include Christmas at the beach in Sydney, Australia on the eve of the millennium and a Netflix rom/com style Christmas eve at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. But I don’t have any family Christmas traditions—not the kind of thing that you do every year, that you plan for and talk about, that you hang memories on and laugh about or roll your eyes about, or even resent. I don’t even have any bad holiday traditions anymore—it’s just a blank slate every year going all the way back to when I lived with my parents. Every year, I wait to find out what will happen and then hang my vintage decorations and string lights around it and hope for the best.
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If I could wave a magic wand and create a Christmas tradition, it would be to celebrate the OG style Twelve days of Christmas. I would restore the cultural tradition and add my own touches. To make the interval of December 25th to January 6th into one long holiday is the perfect mix of pacing and excess. It right-sizes all the individual elements while also making everything last longer. In my perfect world, we would exchange a present all 12 of the days—a lot of little things like a love note or a plate of cookies and then a couple of big things like a new espresso maker or five golden rings. (Yes, gifts are my love-language.) We would right-size all the festivities, too, so it’s not all one gigantic stressful day but rather day after day of hot beverages and yule logs and velvet dresses and singing and candlelight and champagne and binge watching whatever is the cool new show. There would be time to see your parents and time to see your friends and time to be alone with your lover and time for the kids to go wild with their cousins. There would also be time for going to church and feeling reverent, time for feeling tired and sad because it’s cold and dark, and time for spending a whole day curled up under an afghan with a book. It would be as good as Hanukkah, but even longer and with the highest rating of religious importance so that everyone in the Christianized world could legitimately demand the time off of work. We would parcel the whole thing out in an annual reenactment of the symbolic importance of Christ’s birth and the eventual visitation of the Magi.
My mood board for this is, of course, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which pits a large amount of cross-dressing, romance-mongering, and guns-out prank-playing against a literal and metaphorical shipwreck of loss and grief. To go back to conversation between my podcast heroes, Tarence and Tom, Twelfth Night is the perfect theatrical guidebook for how to enact the over/under on the end of the world experienced each December.
So, Twelfth Night is the play that gave us the line that graces 10,000 kitchens in a lively cursive font, “If music be the food of love, play on” but let’s look at the darkness of all of this first because none of this works otherwise.
There’s a Duke named Orsino who digs a Lady named Olivia. The Duke is the least at-risk character because he is a rich guy, but also he’s not one of the rapey, bad kind of rich guys. He’s lonely and lovesick and clearly doesn’t know how to talk to girls because he has to send his assistant to make his case to Olivia. Also, it’s not his fault that his parents are rich. Olivia also has money, but her dad died a year ago, her brother just died recently, and as a woman without a male protector, it’s a good thing she’s got money because nothing else is going to go well unless she is really lucky. Let’s assume she really loved her brother and her dad—that’s really sad already. And the play tells us that while she’s going through the grief of that, she also has to set up this whole additional performative grief thing about how she cannot marry for seven years to keep the local dudes from forcibly marrying her for her money.
Also starring in Twelfth Night are Viola and Sebastian who are twins who got shipwrecked and separated, and they each think the other one is dead. And, maybe because we don’t really travel by ship anymore, being shipwrecked seems all romantic and such, and evocative of beautiful young people washing up on a cinematic beach with their clothes all wet and clinging to their fit bods. But that’s not the right way to think about this. Try thinking about them as hurricane or tornado victims. What if Viola and Sebastian worked in a candle factory and got separated and each one thinks the other is dead and is having to go on news shows and be amplified on Twitter as they try to find each other. And people are trying to rape Viola and imprison Sebastian because he was part of a gang a long time ago. It’s dark like that. It’s really bad. Viola is so beset that she’s dressing like a man and going by the name of Cesario because, uh, that’s what you’d do if it was 1600 and you were a young woman marooned alone on a Balkan island. And it works because Viola/Cesario manages to get the job as Orsino’s assistant. Meanwhile, Sebastian is lost on another part of the island with a guy named Antonio for most of the play.
These four main characters are, like me and probably a lot of you, existing at the end of their known world, in the darkest, coldest time of the year, without a safe harbor in sight. They are lonely, beset, panicked, unsure what to do next, worried about family members, and honestly just looking for some love and laughter and light in an otherwise terrifying world.
There’s also a whole group from central casting who muck about all across three acts of the play just doing mean pranks on each other and not caring at all about the death and destruction that is all around them. There’s Malvolio, who has got to be one of the most famous victims of bullying in literary history other than Oliver Twist. He’s the guy who gets tricked into thinking that he should wear yellow, cross-gartered tights because Olivia wants him to, but is then locked up because when he does that and says the things his so-called friends tell him to say, Olivia thinks he is insane. Then, while he is locked up, his ‘friends’ get a priest to comes and mess with him some more so that he really starts to think he is insane. Also during this time, a guy named Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who also fancies Olivia, does more pranking and fake dueling with his friends, up to and including getting both Sebastian and Antonio, who are literally just trying to survive after having been shipwrecked, arrested. And if this sounds vaguely like the collected elected leadership of the United States, yes, yes you are correct, the casual cruelty and empty pontificating of these myopic and stupidly ordinary Shakespearean characters could absolutely be seen as a metaphor for the banality of 21st century government-enacted evil.
You know Shakespeare, though, so you know what happens. Everyone falls in love with the wrong person—at first. Olivia falls in love with Viola-Cesario even as Viola-Cesario is trying to court her for Orsino. And it is Olivia who gets to say some of the best lines in the play including when she goads Viola-as-Cesario to just stop being all buttoned up and afraid of her truest self
Alas, it is the baseness of thy fear
That makes thee strangle thy propriety:
Fear not, Cesario; take thy fortunes up;
Be that thou know'st thou art, and then thou art
As great as that thou fear'st.
Which is amazing advice except that if Viola-as-Cesario really leaned in to the greatness of what she “know’st” she is, she would be walking around as a woman named Viola, not as a guy named Cesario, and she would be getting together with Orsino, not making his case to Olivia.
Olivia also gets to say these lines to Orsino when he keeps asking if she is into him.
If it be aught to the old tune, my lord,
It is as fat and fulsome to mine ear
As howling after music.
Which translates, roughly, to “dude, please do not ever ask me that again” only so much better.
Luckily, Sebastian and Antonio show up just in time so that it is Sebastian and not Viola/Cesario who is force-married to Olivia in a hasty wedding. And Sebastian is ok with this, luckily, especially since he is reunited with his sister whom he thought “the blind waves and surges have devour'd.” And once it’s been made clear that Viola is not Cesario, Orsino is interested, as well, though he does seem to want confirmation about her gender identity because he asks, “let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.”
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The backdrop for all of this mishigas is the Christian Feast of Epiphany, which happens on January 5th—the twelfth night after Christmas night—and which has origins in Catholicism but was also adopted by the Church of England. Like all feast days before the Puritans got hold of everything and ruined the fun, it was a time for significant revelry. In England there was a Lord of Misrule (in Scotland it was the Abbot of Unreason) who could give permission for all kinds of good times such as cross dressing between genders, or servants and masters, and plenty of drinking and hooking up. And, like so many Christian traditions, the whole thing is laid down over a pagan tradition, in this case the Roman Saturnalia, which was also all about overturning norms. In ancient Rome the masters would provide a feast for their slaves and there was partying and gambling for days.
All of which puts a fine point on two important things. One is that partying because the world is going to end has been going on since the beginning—it’s something that appears to need to be done annually. The second is that there is a human instinct—maybe even it’s a need—to semi-regularly ritualize the bending of the rules. The whole point of the Saturnalia, and from it the Feast of Epiphany, was to let out the pressure of being civilized, productive, law-abiding, earnest human beings by embracing the chaos for just a little bit. It’s not a coincidence that back in the day during deep winter there were no crops to get in and not enough light to do any extra labor. It was the only time in the year when there was time to sit around and be licentious and push on all the deepest questions. Even now, though we are lit up by our computer screens, it does seem to me that the long nights of December are best for putting on your finest clothes, lighting a bunch of candles to whatever is your god, and commencing with singing, drinking and flirting. When the darkness is at its peak, the best thing to do is throw caution to the wind and go for it.
We have to let those strange, cross-gartered parts of ourselves surface once in awhile if only to counteract the menacing severity of our own mortality. I mean, look at the Nativity. The God of the universe came down to earth and got into the tiny body of a wrinkly little baby, set up shop in a barn with a bunch of sheep, and then accepted tributes such as gold and spices from world leaders. In the barn. With the sheep looking on. Also, angels were singing. It’s hilarious. It’s genius. There’s nothing funnier than subverting all the norms and roles and laughter can be the quickest and easiest way to confront the deepest truths.
James Joyce, writing in the early 1900s coopted the concept of epiphany for his own, literary use, calling it “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” And this is what I want for a Christmas tradition: an annual, ritualized, permissive, mechanism for coaxing out sudden manifestations of the sublime. It’s the only cure for the despair and the grief that is endemic to the annual slide into darkness. I want this once a year—is it so much to ask for what the Romans had and the English had?
Because, without it, what else is there? Another year of staggering along, posting on social media and trying to get in shape or get our kids into school or get a promotion or whatever it is that we know we have to do to keep the wheels turning.
This is not enough. It shouldn’t ever be enough.
*
One of the friends with whom I used to drive around in a pickup truck back in the day was named Michael, and he was the funniest of all of them. He was smart and uncannily wise for a young man and had a sly, witty way of saying the truthful but awkward things right out loud. He said things to teachers that would have gotten the rest of us sent to the principal. He said things to our parents that would have gotten the rest of us grounded. He told us the truth about the hopelessness of our crushes and the stupidity of our silly teenage behavior. He got away with it because he made us laugh about these awkward, truthful things, and because he was full of love. Everyone was a better and happier person with him because no one had to hide around him.
He was killed in a car accident on January 5th when he was twenty-five. It was a brutal, life-changing loss for everyone who loved him—and there were a lot of us who loved him.
And yet, every single year when January 5th comes around, I am slightly comforted by the idea that Michael—our magnificent, beautiful boy—who moved so effortlessly between the ordinary and the extraordinary, slipped away from us on the night of the year that is dedicated to chaos and insight. Without my passing knowledge of the rituals and traditions of the Feast of Epiphany, I would have no way of making any kind of meaning out of his loss. It’s hard enough as it is.
I need traditions.
We all need traditions.
We need the Lord of Misrule to come out once a year and bulk-grant us forgiveness for all the ways that we have failed ourselves and our children. We need the Abbot of Unreason to come out and give a great big shrug about how broken everything is and crack a big, inappropriate joke. We need to pour our silliness and foibles and longings and loneliness out like a libation and make of these things an offering to the gods of chance. We need to gamble all our fears and hopes in one great big annual conflagration of letting go.
And then when we’ve wrung ourselves out and slept it all off, we can wake up and go about the business of building lives again. Because that’s the bargain of the Feast of Epiphany. Cesario will go and put on a dress and become Viola so that Orsino doesn’t have to stray too far from heterodoxy. Lovers will wake up and look at each other sheepishly and agree without speaking to never mention what they did last night. Writers will open up their old computers and go back to trying to make a shitty first draft a little bit better.
Parents will go back to doing all that they can to make their children feel safe and loved.
The light will come back.
The world will keep on turning.
First Day of Christmas
Doodle Dispatches is SBB’s resident artist and saves us all, every week, from the dreaded Wall of Text. You can see her work on Twitter and Instagram, as well as order all kinds of fun prints and gifts at DoodleDispatches.com
Merry Christmas! I’ll see you in 2022! —xoxo, Courtney
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