The Ghost Of Christmas Future

I'm relistening to a book Lewis Black came out with a few years ago called I'm Dreaming Of A Black Christmas. Mr. Black wrote the book to give an alternative perspective on Christmas. On several fronts, he is not in a position to enjoy the holiday. He is a Jew, he has no family of his own, he has no great love of Germanic tradition, despises winter, and has no patience for shopping or holiday advertising. However, he does enjoy being invited over to friends' homes for holiday dinners and wine. In a small way, I can relate to Mr. Black. Likely as a result of a bad marriage wherein his wife tricked him info thinking her pregnancy was his doing (It was from an affair), he's never been able to have a wife and child of his own. His parents are terrible cooks, so he avoids them at the holidays, which also means Thanksgiving is a no-go. So he's alone on Christmas, aside from the friends who will take him in for a time. This is my future as well, although I doubt I'll be invited in by friends, as Mr. Black is fortunate enough to be. So I must ask myself how one enjoys Christmas alone.

If you stay single long enough, there is a very particular set of things that will happen. At first, you'll be okay because the elders of your family will keep everyone coming together in one large family gathering in all the multiple generations. Eventually though, the elders die off and you are left with your own generation. Your own generation will have made their own families by then and want to have their own Christmas gatherings in their own homes, as they have acquired in-laws and additional extended family. Family, in this sense, is an exhaustible resource and you'll lose that resource eventually if you don't replenish it by starting your own. At the point you face being alone on Christmas and the important thing to figure out is how to cope with that circumstance. You may well end up alone on your computer or in front of your television while nearly everyone you know celebrates family, generosity, and also Jesus, if they like. Avoiding that has become a preoccupation of mine.

Fortunately, I've got a while before I really have to face being alone on Christmas and that gives me time to figure out what to do when the time comes. I figure there are about four options of ways to handle the problem. Ideally, you get invited to someone's actual Christmas. It's a little like getting adopted, I suppose. You're all out of family, so someone else lets you borrow theirs when you need it most. Another route is to simply throw your own Christmas party, inviting over everyone else that also has nowhere to go. Finding enough people in that circumstance is the main flaw in that option. Then there's parties other people organize before actual Christmas, like the one in the cigar shop I've been hanging out in for 15 years. Those only have the problem that they're not on Christmas itself, so you're still alone on Christmas. Finally, there's going on vacation during the holidays, both Thanksgiving and Christmas. While I have the advantage that I can cover all expenses for a traveling partner, which I require for if to be fun, I still have to find another person with nowhere to go on both holidays. None of these solutions are perfect and I may well end up alone in my condo on Christmas one day, but I'll try and enjoy my favorite holiday however I can as long as I can.