Against popular opinion, I find Halloween to be the least scary time of year. “Spooky season” normalizes the skeletons and ghasts and butchered pumpkins that would frighten at least the very young. Under the bacchanalia of Halloween celebrations, one indulges in behaviors that would terrify their uninebriated selves. We abandon fear, if anything.
Rather, the scariest time of year comes right after Halloween, when brittle leaves cascade down from their trees, the air turns brisk too sharply, and the infinitely romantic Happy Holidays show their faces. This period used to be my favorite time of year. Everything reminded me of something: crunchy foliage brought back crashing down Riverside Park hills on my Razor scooter; stoplights on Columbus Avenue summoned oversized jackets and processions for middle school Thanksgiving assemblies in synagogues, all of us 6th graders desperately awaiting the long weekend; any velvet hue conjured aromatic pine and the new Pokémon game that I’d play on Christmas day until sunset. I was like Proust and his madeleine.
I suppose the holiday season is still my favorite time of year (if for no other reason than I can’t think of a better one), but the feelings have lost their regularity and candescence. The constellations of twinkling rope lights and the sweet candy-cane storefronts stocked with teddy bears and mink coats and ruby-colored dutch ovens (not that I ever asked Santa for any of these things) no longer rouse awe and wonder, as if the excitement and easy expectation of warm love and fulfillment borne within these festive totems somehow abandoned me. Over Thanksgiving Break, I went with a friend up Fifth Avenue to the Bryant Park Holiday Market, an operation of temporary pop-up stores, red-green-white LED lines, and a packed ice rink. It’s our tradition to go every year, but this time around, we didn’t relish in the glowing lights or in its likeness to a quaint Swede town. Instead, we bemoaned the unpassable crowds who seemed to have never developed spatial awareness and the pointless trinkets in the pop-up stalls.
Maybe capitalism ruined the holidays, or at least the knowledge that there was an underpaid creative team on the 35th floor of a gray Midtown office building that exhaustingly tested various shades of Thanksgiving and Christmas, selected careful slogans, and even manufactured the scents of the air on Fifth Avenue. Maybe I should go to these Christmas villages later in the year, or become a more avid consumer. Or, maybe whenever I look in a glass display at Saks, I see someone older in the dimmed reflection, a person irrevocably changed from the boy he used to be.
I suppose all of these things converge to the same issue: loss of innocence. Passing time, especially at my age, erodes the enchantment of the present to a point where even nostalgia—which undeservedly adopts a bad reputation in the modernist view (e.g. “you can’t live in the past”)—can’t restore it. The salvations that once seemed so guaranteed – the instant panacean effects of a slice of turkey breast or a mug of hot chocolate, the unbridled joy of gazing at unopened gifts—are no longer found in the same places, and nobody seems to know where they went, or if they died.
Without the ability to regain the “holiday spirit” and whatever feelings come packaged with it, I’m left unmoored, with no anchor from which I can go through life with a sense of emotional security. Every excursion outside, every interaction, every moment I might be seen by someone carries a buzzing apprehension, that if some misfortune or calamity occurs, there’s no lighted fir tree under which I can find easy refuge.
But don’t mistake me for a total Grinchy cynic. When I’m with friends and start laughing under falling maple leaves or the “JE LUX” lights, a small flame will swim up my nerve stem, and I’ll feel a little warmer. But those familiar feelings are hard to come by. Maybe regaining holiday nostalgia is an eternally worthy mission: to never lose child-like innocence. I haven’t had any success.
Or maybe it’s time to leave the expected comforts of nostalgia behind and instead become comfortable in the discomfort of the not-knowing. This path is less approachable. Can we ever move on? Are we cursed by Nietzsche’s Eternal Return? Is the past truly bankrupt? Can we rely on the future? All I can say is that skeletons and ghosts don’t seem that scary anymore.
