Christmas for me is a way to check my default setting for mind control. How are my gauges?

The black and white picture my father took of me standing next to my mother after he had broken furniture and attacked both she and I was his trophy prize.  We were captured in the 1950’s living room with the over sized white flower painting behind us. The single blossom perched on two green leaves floating in a vast white space. In father’s photograph, the camera lens was focused on a fabric covered chair sitting up right with my rigid mother held in place between the wooden arms.. A single small lamp shed its funnelled light over my seven year old body still shocked, petrified next to my mother without comfort.

I remember his voice screaming at us to, “Smile. Look happy. It’s Christmas.”

The small tree sat within the boundaries of the photograph. As I look back at it now, I am seeing that he could control the harm. Both my mother and I were bruised, battered but not where it would show. And the tree was there to celebrate what a perfection our shared holiday was to the inevitable visitors that would arrive during the holiday.

Each Year as Christmas approaches, I think, “You are doing so well.”

But it is a gradual growth. If I am arrogant enough to think I am beyond it, I soon see what a bill of goods that I am trying to sell myself.

I no longer awake crying at night during the “festival season” with the feeling that something is terribly wrong. The traditional promises of the season were not just broken but were never available to us. Putting an insane man high on drugs or alcohol with his family for days on end would never turn out to be peace on earth.

But as the years imitate one another, spring with always flying tulips, the summer heat massaging exposed flesh and then the shutting down darkness approach of the long winter, inevitably the black dog of depression would appear running beside me as Christmas approached.

With so many decades of mindfulness practice, I stand back and take a picture of how I stand now, this year. The aching feeling of being a ghost, a person without substance just floating through the days comes at times. The sense of being unseen so completely that if I stood in front of a mirror no human shape, nor indeed any shape would appear returns but with less frequency .
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The constant making of peace with the not being at peace is a skill I have developed. I ask myself, “How are you doing?”

Some days I don’t dress and just vacate my own narrative to parasite onto lives enacted on Netflix. Some days I disappoint myself by breaking the taunt rules I have in place to make my life a predictable and safe place.

But in the last few years I will intervene and forgive myself, “It is okay. This is a tough time for you.”

I rarely put up any decorations at all. It is as if enacting Christmas rituals will only deepen the depression. I enjoy my neighbours fun house lit up yard and go to hear a dear friend sing in her choir. And there are break throughs. I had my son’s family over for Christmas dinner Chinese take out last year.

The sense of awaiting the black dog to tear me apart is gone. I know it will appear. And I am not trying to run from it. I simply jog along beside it in a strangely companionable manner. I am cognizant of the small victories, the deeper sense of trusting myself, the long stretches of tranquility.

And I am so in love with people. At Christmas when I go out the door and see the miracle of kindness that passes between family members, the gesture of someone helping the person next to them take off a coat, two friends leaning into one another at a coffee table and breaking into laughter, I understand the stunning beauty of the uncelebrated moments. They are not seasonal. They cannot be purchased. But they are everywhere, even in the midst of demands of manufactured rituals. The blossoming of joy is not relegated to December.

I know I am getting better, because I see the way that people share themselves now… even at Christmas. And it makes me happy.