A Christmas Eve of Introspection

On the Christmas mornings of my boyhood, I rose early and looked through a frosty window to the street where snow covered the suburbs. That magic was only magnified when my brother, sisters, and I ran to the tree and gaped at the bounty gleaming beneath tinsel and lights. We knew, really knew, that we could count on peace on Earth and good will, then and in the future, not just to men (remember this was the late sixties and some consciousnesses were rising) but to all, like the “Happy Christmas” and “Good Night” Santa shouts into the wintry midnight while flying to the next chimney.

(By the way, thank you, Clement Clarke Moore, not only for the excellent poem nearly all of us know and love, but for what, to my eye, is a stellar example of perfect (or true or exact or full) rhyme throughout all fifty-six lines, a magnificent accomplishment. See the work:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43171/a-visit-from-st-nicholas)

As many of you know, I love the holidays of the winter solstice, or whatever you want to call these days of celebration, gifts, and the return of the sun from southern latitudes. I hope that in six months, the summer solstice also finds you alive and healthy.

If you remain Covid-free, I salute you.

If you are one of the 18,391,571 Americans who have contracted and recovered from Covid-19, good for you. If you wore the mask, maintained social distance, and quarantined, and still were infected, I wish you good health. I will also take your experience as a warning to us all that the virus is highly infectious, and I will continue to take the best protective steps I can.

If you are a Covidiot, who denied the existence of the virus you contracted and survived, the effectiveness of the mask you refused to wear, and the potential lethality of large gatherings during a pandemic, then I hope you have now joined the rest of us in trying to stop the spread of the pandemic.

And if you survived and still deny the virus, then f**k you. I am not sure how you live with yourself, considering that you most likely spread the virus to family, friends, and fellow Americans who died from your failure to protect yourself and others. If you infected other people, you probably, eventually, and inevitably killed at least one. When I say “you,” I mean you.

As my holiday gift, I am giving us all our own bathroom mirrors, those shrines we all visit before we embark for our quotidian victories, vanquishments, venialities, and worse. May that moment of rushed morning reflection become a deeper daily look into whatever makes you tick, to review the mechanism that drives you. I hope what you see is a pleasant discovery, but as the deplorables say, “It is what it is.” A good look at whatever you are is my fervent solstice wish for you because there are some consequences I still cannot bring myself to wish on you.