It’s official Be happy

There are certain days when we are supposed to be happy. This—Christmas Day—for some, is one of them. Or a birthday, an anniversary. Or the extreme: the enforced/ forced gaiety of New Year’s Eve.

 I am writing today, Christmas Day, not as a curmudgeon, not as a glass-half-empty whiner (my glass is overflowing, and I know it), but as a person contemplating the gulf between “authentic” happiness and the happiness we are “supposed” to feel, the culture-imposed happiness of a secularized holiday drowning under the weight of consumer capitalism. No, I am not making the “put the Christ back in Christmas” argument.

 It's something else I am contemplating, like maybe how all this doom-scrolling we do, this daily, hourly immersion in all that is wrong and bad and evil and scary out there, that this wallowing primes us to grasp at these “official,” sanctioned happiness moments.

 Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a news article about the partial collapse of a wharf in California. Scrolling through, I found a list of “related” articles, including: Person Dies After Being Trapped By Debris at Beach, 5 Skiers Hospitalized after “Incident” on Chair Lift, Vehicle Catches Fire in Tunnel, Three Dead in two Separate Vehicle Collisions.

 And these are related how?

 And they make us feel what?

 I’ll answer that last one: sad, scared, anxious, vulnerable, powerless.

 So, of course, bring on the reindeer prancing on rooftops. Bring on the boxes under the tree. Lots of boxes. More boxes. As the journalist Mary T. Schmich wrote in the Chicago Tribune in an article published on Christmas Eve 1986 (thus coining the phrase that ends this sentence):

"We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy".

 Which brings me back to authentic happiness, whenever and wherever it occurs, that moment, unplanned. Like this one, last night: The one-year-old scurrying across the floor, beelining it to me, huge smile on his face. Behind him is the Christmas tree with presents for him. He doesn’t care. He is after the hug. And so am I.

(Image: This year Santa gets Pimientos de Padrón & tequila)