Faculty Blog Post: Christmas Season Joys and Anxieties
The first Christmas wasn’t necessarily the happiest day ever. Days on a donkey, pregnant with nowhere to sleep, bright lights in the sky, both smelly bad and smelly nice strangers showing up to look at your baby….not screaming Rockwell. Maybe it was the mix….the bad and good…the normal and sublime that make that day, for at least one reason, one that we have built so many stories and traditions around. In our modern pseudo-cultural Christmas time, we have done our best to hide the ‘bad’ parts of Christmas, the anxiety or sadness, under the trappings of the good, the decorations and presents. Can we yet say that in the same way the Corvette signals something about the driver, a Christmas light extravaganza can also inform us on the occupant of the house?
The tendency to avoid the bad in favor of the good or at least the palatable is an old ‘finding’ in the world of psychology. Sigmund Freud described a host of defense mechanisms processes for avoiding or hiding our unconscious feelings or desires in socially acceptable trappings—prior to the turn of the century. More colloquial, our social adherence to a ‘fake till you make it’ mentality has led to us to the point where a smile is somewhat more circumspect than a frown. Not a new finding, in 1967 Holmes and Rahe developed a Life Stress Scale. At the top of the scale, scoring 100 points, was the loss of a spouse. At the bottom of the scale, with a score of 12, was Major Holiday. Yes—there is metric to discern the relative difference between dinner with your in-laws and the death of your husband or wife! The holiday stress is not a new […]