The holiday season is over. Finally. I know, I know. It is an old refrain. Like one of those songs, you remember the tune but you are not sure who sang them and when. I know, I am not alone when saying: Xmas sucks. Big time. Ok, ok… I know, that this is not a universal law. Obviously, a lot of people love Xmas. And a different lot of people don’t. I belong to those that don’t. Not all the time, at least.

See, I used to love Xmas when I was a child. Not just for the presents. Well, of course also for the presents. But the great thing was the feeling. The sense of belonging. Mine is a small family. My mother and my father have no brothers or sisters, so Xmas, for me, was always a matter of a handful of people. Me, my parents, my brother and our grandparents, one for a side. The father of my father and the mother of my mother. Xmas was the day of my ‘big’ family reunion, fancy food, and huge discussions.
Xmas was coffee in the morning with grandma and a treasure hunt for the presents later on, all around the house. And no chores. Or, at least, not so many as usual.

Now my family is far cause I am living abroad, and Xmas is just me and the cat. And is cool. But, different. The feeling of sharing is gone. Like my childhood. And even if the kid in me is still healthy and alive, some things cannot really be the same. I miss my family for Xmas. But more than ever, I miss having a strong and cheerful dad instead of an old, sweet and fragile man. I miss my grandmother, long gone. I miss the black hair of my mother, and her standing straight, next to me. I miss the game I was playing with my brother when we were closer than ever. Best friends, forever. I miss our family bookstore, the lights set up for the sales, the fake snow and the singing Santa Claus to whom kids were having fun taking the pants off, every single day. I miss the cold, and that sense of possibilities and trust that was like a blanket. Now, the world is scary. It is a dark place, full of questions with no answers. This is what I missed for Xmas. And this is why Xmas for me now sucks.

Sure, growing up is not so fancy as we used to think it would be. It is a mess. A riddle with no solution. And it is fine this way. Because, life is a big adventure and like all the adventures, there are dangers and monsters. And challenges. Never ending challenges. But there are also amazing places, incredible people and things to discover. It is a matter of choices and of points of view. And yeah, Xmas should be a moment of happiness and peace, a single instant of rest to be present. And maybe, I hate Xmas, cause I cannot really feel that ‘rest and peace’ anymore, or that sense of belonging I used to love. But I deeply love the rest of the year. Every, single day of it.

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Now, to go back to Xmas, this year,  my family had a nice one. They told me they were all together, well … the three of them. They had fancy foods and some small baby fireworks in the garden. My brother was there. My parents were together. Old, more fragile than before, but alive. And still in love with each other. They are blessed. I tell them all the times: they are the richest on Earth. And deeply, even if they complain, they will never change to have each other for any amount of money. This is a blessing. My blessing. And I am grateful for it. And I also know that, if I look back, I should already feel like a survivor. I am not old, but many friends of mine are gone already. I faced loss and anger. And pain. I died and I was reborn, somehow. Maybe the secret to understanding life, as Bukowski was saying, to actually living it,  is dying first a couple of times. Metaphorically, obviously.

Jokes aside, maybe, for this reason, I respect life but I deeply dislike Xmas. Her silly and cynic sense of humor, her way of putting things together. And I respect human beings as well. No matter who. No matter what. Cause, like me, they are traveling their own road. They make mistakes, they face challenges and somehow, broken or not, they survive. We are all the same. Different chapters of a book, appendices, handwritten small notes at the bottom of a page. We carry different messages, but at the end, we are going through the same Odyssey. We are all traveling to find Ithaca. Our own Ithaca. The real question is when we will find it, could we finally be happy there or like Ulysses, we will feel the urge to set sail again to reach the end of the world?

Happy new year.

Love V@g