Finding the Unexpected Joy within Holiday Melancholy
by Jeanne Denney
I was born in Iowa to a Mennonite mother and a Methodist father some 61 years ago, the youngest child of four. It was a humble beginning, but one that left me with all the words and harmonies of Christian carols embedded in my bones. I was one of those Christmas children. So all of the little traditions we had for doing this holiday in our little town were deeply felt. And they were simple. My mother’s cookies and sweet rolls were among them. Truth told, I am not an enthusiastic baker. But once a year since my children were young I have pulled out the Kitchen Aide mixer and tried to pass along some baking.
Christmas baking coincided with something else that came predictably in late December. It was a profound feeling I don’t really have words for: part grief, part joy, a sudden drop into a deep well in my heart I don’t usually have access to. Certain songs still trigger it for me: the Wexford Carol, parts of Handel’s Messiah, James Taylors’s “Some Children See Him”. Do you know those rouge sobs? The ones you don’t have a reason for? The ones that arise unexpectedly from some deep place of wisdom, knowing and sorrow? Grieving through Advent has been a part of my personal pilgrim’s walk to Bethlehem for many adult years. I seem to have to encounter the birth/death reality of life, and the great pathos of being human just as the sun ebbs. In years past I kept too busy to give these feelings much time. I just carried on, crying into the cookie dough, adding my salt to the sugar.
But this year I am not baking, I am in Bogota, Colombia with a brand new granddaughter. The waves of feeling are here on cue. I have had more time to study them. I see that all these years these feelings have taken me through very necessary undoing. I see that this undoing as just part of my nature, and part of Nature. A solstice gift. Nothing broken. Whatever this annual joy/pain is, it opens a rare door to barely remembered experiences, and unnameable feelings. Weirdly, as I age, the melancholy is almost as exquisite as the joy was for me as a child. What an irony! I wonder if we are all invited to touch into our birth just a little in this season, and to feel the blessing of life’s deep melancholy. It is a deep feeling that needs its very own name.
Let’s not call this upwelling of sorrow “holiday depression”. That would pathologize and diminish a natural movement of soul. No, it is a genuine pull into deeper self unique to the dark days of the year. We may be in the urgency for gifts or festivity, or stopped in our tracks by a pandemic. Either way, we might pause to notice the engraved invitation to greater wisdom, and to that which the pandemic can’t touch. What I am trying to say is that a certain amount of melancholy actually belongs to December. It is part of the journey. If we don’t actively claim our own deep sorrow, wisdom and joy, how much depth does our merriment have? And of course (do I even need to say it) this is not just a Christian phenomenon. World over, in every religious tradition, humans grow by going together into this darkness and out again.
God knows that there is plenty for us human folk to grieve about this year. I won’t name all of the devastations we are witnessing, or the fear we are walking through. It is all true, personally and globally. But this particular grief leaves me with solace. It opens my heart. It helps me remember the deeper love that the universe provides through all trial, hardship and through every deep contraction of spirit and body. In the middle of it, I remember love.
So here is my wish for you, for anyone who is suffering with melancholy this season, for anyone that knows what I am talking about. Try not to fight it. Don’t dress it up. Don’t over-ride it. Don’t medicate it. Open the door, don’t close it. Allow this deep space to feed you. Don’t say “Oh, if only everything were perfect in my life like it should be at Christmas…like it is for everyone else but me.”. Just take the journey into this sacred dark this year. Let your heart open and your tears fall where they do. Into the sugar or the songs. Into the spaces where we may very predictably find each other’s hearts again.
I wish us all that kind of joy this year. That kind of love.
I'll meet you there.
Jeanne
Header photo by Jessica Delp
