By Mike Ivaska
Last week I was diagnosed with high blood pressure.
This is due, in part I’m sure, to the stresses of life.
It also likely stems from genetics.
It also doesn’t help, I imagine, that I’m a middle-aged fat guy who likes Doritos.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being middle-aged. The cynic in me would like to say I’m more four-seventh’s aged than truly middle-aged. Perhaps even two-third’s aged, but I don’t want to think about that.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about fall.
As we head into fall, the days are already noticeably shorter. The temperatures are, finally perhaps, dropping. Our loved-hated, first-of-many, rainy seasons has begun. It’s finally starting to feel like the Pacific Northwest around here again.
But with the shorter days and the rain comes the not-too-distant emotional struggles many of us will have. Depression is not always seasonal, but the lack of sunlight, vitamin D, and physical activity will start to catch up with some of us.
So will the approach of the holidays.
For some of us, these days will be reminders of those who are gone. For others, they will raise the stressful specter of having to travel and see family, or having to host family in our homes. For some, the struggle of cultural values will bubble under the surface. For others, these cultural values will be the reason we won’t be seeing family this year (and haven’t, perhaps, for a while).
But there is wisdom in the season that is coming. A wisdom, I daresay, not unlike the wisdom that begins to settle on us in middle age.
Not until moving to Vashon Island in late elementary school did I ever learn that there were Christians who didn’t “do” Halloween. The handful of Halloweens I had in my childhood home of Meridian, Idaho, were always events that brought people together. Everybody “did” Halloween, as far as I knew. As evangelical Protestants of a decidedly low-church variety, the day had nothing to do with All Saints’ the next morning. And as suburbanites in southern Idaho (outside Boise), it was the first in a series (followed by Thanksgiving and Christmas) where the neighborhood suddenly exploded into unified behavior – decorating, candy-buying, and costuming.
After Halloween, of course, came Thanksgiving.
And after Thanksgiving, Christmas.
It was, admittedly, a suburban, American, white, middle-class, Protestant Christian way of keeping time. And in the years since, I have learned much about the varying cultures, histories, religions, and holidays of different people.
Through greater cultural and historical awareness, through conscious decisions to break with the past, and through a general cynicism borne of capitalism-fatigue, the holiday seasons certainly are not what they used to be. But as a newly official middle-aged person, complete with my first “old person medicine” prescription, I wanted to remind us of the wisdom in what our culture came up with:
As the days get shorter, colder, wetter, and darker, we’ve learned to mark time – together! – with things that give us joy.
The first holiday we (for the most part) collectively observe is the funniest and the funnest. We make a joke of the shadows, the ghosts and goblins, and the spiders moving into our homes, by making it all a game. We dress up like the things that go bump in the night. We decorate our homes with spider webs. And as the darkness and the damp really begin to make themselves known, we “do” Halloween together with our neighbors. We dress up our kids, we dress up ourselves, and we make an exception to portion sizes on candy.
After all this, we begin planning a meal. It will take us almost a month. We will think about where we want to eat it, and with whom. Will we travel or host? Will we invite neighbors and friends? Whatever else we decide, we already know what the theme is: Gratitude. Or, in old-timey speak, Thanksgiving.
Baked right into the season of darkness, depression, and a greater awareness of being alone, our culture came up with ways to have joy – with reasons to do something with our neighbors and relatives, to be in each other’s homes.
Perhaps, despite how unfathomably serious our culture has become, and how divided and lonely, the coming days have given us some ways to fight the darkness together.
