seasonal greetings

I have developed allergies against Christmas and the New Year. Last winter was a sly escape as I exited Montreal, the biting cold, the consumerist craze, Christmas carols and odd lighting arrangements. Where I ended up there were impoverished people with rich hearts, music and sunlight. Then I found myself, because I said "never again", back in Toronto to spend year 2010. Over the few weeks I am saddened to walk to the liquor store, turn on the radio, to look around me at an intersection. Christmas themed songs, colours, bustling. Claustrophobia. This is an alien world and these plastic Santa Clauses are populating my psyche without my permission. Some things are less, like the world is short of Robin Wood and his playful laughter and Lhasa de Sela for whom hours of snow piled over Montreal to soothe the seeming untimeliness of her passing.

There is the memory of Christmas times in Gaspé, the frozen river, the fire, the magnificent sunsets, the unlikely company who'd pop up out of nowhere. Pierrot endiablé with his Johnny Cash numbers. Thérèse an antidote angel. Are you even alive, Monsieur Pordan? On Christmas Eve the large Québecois families complete with fiddler cousins, tipsy uncles, young giggly nieces, matriarchal grandmothers, the six pâte, the punch, the anxiousness to slip out to the party at somebody's house... Ah, but where was I? I was present but absent, absently present. And perhaps Pierrot was right it was all anthropological research. I carried in my boots made in Istanbul, the gift of irreconcilable differences, my foreignness, my inbuilt distance.

There is also that time when we drove up to New York and were determined to make the best of a New York Christmas and new year -an impossibility. Too much, too many, too hasty. Tourists like us flocked the city with ill conceived Times Square fantasies. We luckily ended up in a dingy bar in Brooklyn to dance to Balkan beats -we'd have done exactly the same had we stayed in Montreal- because we gave up hope in the Big Apple, because we said "the heck with fireworks, câlice!" because we laughed like happy fools when it spitted us out after swishing us back and forth in its big mouth.

Dr F. who works at the emergency of Toronto General said this was the time of year when they had much more cases than usual, suicide attempts, overdose, depression & despair. Perhaps it is just some coincidence that I saw two young women in two parts of town on the same day who looked around them and cursed loudly in public transit. The merriness is gloomy. Christmas is imposing. It is fascism against the less fortunate, the dwellers of the margins, the lost and the forgotten. This is the time of the year when one needs to stage a private play at home, legitimate gluttony under tungsten lights, gold dust from a dollar store, a red& green CN Tower in a snow globe. I am done with all the galloping fun.

If I survive this season, I will treat myself to a trip in the Balkans. And pat myself at the back. And whistle "Santa, baby".