No time
like present to worry about the holidays
With
Thanksgiving circling like a vulture, and
Christmas an anxious 40 days away, this may be
the wrong time to mention it - but the problem
with the holidays is that they don’t come around
often enough. By the time you’ve mastered the
parking, schlepping, shopping, wrapping,
returning and the holding of your tongue, the
marathon of enforced joy is over, and a whole
year elapses until you use those particular
muscles again.
No wonder we hit the eggnog.
Painful as it may
be in the short term, I think we’d be better off
if we held periodic holiday drills - just to
keep toned up during the off-season. An alarm
would sound in your office, or the emergency
response tone would bleat on your TV, and you’d
be instructed which mall to drive to, pronto.
Once there, you’d have 20 minutes to park,
choose three presents, and then visit a
relative, preferably one who asks “So, when are
you going to have children, or is it too late
for you?” After three or four of those
excursions, the real thing wouldn’t seem so bad.
Neither would a magnitude 6 earthquake, come to
think of it.
“So it
would be like making routine visits to the
dentist to have cavities filled instead of only
going in for a root canal,” a friend said when I
floated my idea by her. “I say that with all due
respect to my relatives,” she added.
Like several women I know, she’s stressed -
truly - because she hasn’t yet started her
shopping. Several others, I might mention, are
stressed because they’ve finished theirs but
fret that they left someone out. “And I won’t
realize it until Christmas Day, when all the
stores are closed,” one told me.
As for me, I’m stressed because I’m not yet
stressed, and realize now that I should be, and
worry further that my lack of stress is a
symptom of some psycho-social disorder that will
eventually disable me from buying any presents
at all.
Because from what I’ve heard, the stress is
actually a necessary motivator in many cases.
“Some people need it in order to get moving,”
explained Bonnie Burns, founder of the
Worry Club (motto: “where we worry for
you so you don’t have to!”). “It’s like students
who study at the last minute and excel because
they do.”
So how about we ditch the aromatherapy and chair
massages and soothing cups of cocoa this holiday
season and embrace our stress, celebrate our
anxiety, revel in our tension. Consider it
emotional fuel.
So let me be the first to wish you a happy
holiday, if you can have one, what with all
those people on your gift list, and don’t forget
your child’s new teacher, and can you remember
which sister-in-law has the nut allergy, and by
the way - did you leave the iron on?
-
bteitell@bostonherald.com
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