Re-evaluating Christmas

For myself and probably many other North Carolinians, and maybe many Southerners in general, it just never felt like Christmas this time around.

The weather leading up to the 25^th was consistently balmy and wet and a permanent, barely-there haze seemed to persistently blanket the ground.

Life was also doggedly determined to be busy, full of sleep-deprivation and other various stressors that are too personal to mention.

My wife and I usually listen to James Taylor at Christmas - our very own Christmas album - one that we found on our own, not inheriting from the listening habits of our parents.  The album was released in 2006, only one year after my wife and I began dating, and so it has a special meaning for us.

This year, we realized on yesterday, we did not even listen to one track on the album.

Granted, we did bring out Aaron Neville's Christmas album, a favorite of Becky's father, but how could we have forgotten James Taylor?  His folksy, oddball takes on Christmas standards had become one of our holiday traditions. 

Though I'm an atheist, I love Christmas.  I see no reason why I can't enjoy a holiday that is, for me, just as much about family, Winter, and tradition as it is for others about the birth of Christ.  My parents were generous in handing Christmas traditions to me and my siblings - ornaments for each of us every year, a trip to Boone, NC to pick out a Christmas tree and, later, to rent a mountain cabin in which to spend the actual holiday.  The Nutcracker and A Currier & Ives Christmas were our musical standards in the James family.

We didn't even watch A Wish For Wings That Work (a deliciously neurotic and thoroughly wonderful tale) this year - though that was only due to my own reticence - maybe because I all ready felt out of the Christmas spirit before the holiday even arrived.

All of this malaise-induced Scroogery has led me to wonder if I should re-evaluate Christmas as a whole.

I'll be 27 in January, I have a son who is only 3-months-old, and he has rightly taken over the roost insofar as being the center of all holiday excitement.

I'd hate to think that I'm simply becoming too old to be excited about the holiday season, and I don't think that's necessarily true, but it becomes harder to find a culprit to blame for my lack of merriment.

Then I think that it's something in me that's holding back the so-called spirit of the season.

Distraction.  Preoccupation with trying to pigeon-hole my childhood experiences into current Christmases.  A sudden lack of interest in gift-receiving.

At what other time in an adult's life is it OK to try to relive childhood delirium aside from Christmas?

I think that I can have that delirium if I perhaps stop forcing myself to try to feel what should come, and probably will come, naturally if I simply allow it.

My birthday is in less than a month - let's see if I can avoid neuroticizing it.  I know that's not a word.