I always land on this day with my heart pretty much around my ankles because I love Christmas, plain and simple, and because I’ve always viewed the Epiphany, the Day of the [Three] Kings, as the last hurrah of the festive season. But this year it falls on a Monday, and try as I may, and I promise you I did try, I spent all day yesterday doing the bulk of the cleaning and re-organising after taking the decorations down. Still, the tree soldiers on right next to me at this very moment, as it will be a two-people job and not one we have tackled yet.
But then, who am I to reject an evergreen [although, admittedly, it is now more of an evergrey] wrapped in red, blue, green and yellow lights? Nobody, that’s who. And so if we manage it later, we may remove the string and cut the branches off and, eventually, place whatever remains on the pavement outside. If not, it’ll still be here until the next rubbish day, which is Friday.
I thought a lot about Christmas and life in general yesterday as I was unhooking glass headphones and glass pizzas and glass aubergines and glass slices of beans on toast and placing them in the boxes where they live for eleven months of the year. I started to think that maybe I am at that place in life whereby Christmas is predominantly enveloped in nostalgia, so much so as to be suffocated by it. I have no kids, you see, and I firmly believe that those who do are probably, and very rightly, more involved in the doing and the effort and the dedication for the sake of future memories. In my case, those memories were created for me by pa and ma and therefore I now exist in a tug o’ war between wanting to enjoy the present but actually feeling very deeply that, somehow, the very best Christmases, the super-pinnacle of all joys, are most likely behind me.
This is not fundamentally a Christmas issue either, mind you; not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine who, at fifty-odd, is older than me by a handful of years, the potential that our best years have passed [and passed us by]. Now, this is a very controversial topic if you ask me; considering how I feel inside in general, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I am infinitely less buffeted [and less buffet-a-ble] at 48 than I was at 38 and 28 and 18. Absolutely. But my friend Penny was making a very relevant and general point when she was discussing physical ailments and pains and weight gain and so on and so forth. When I reflected on that conversation I did think that, physically, I felt hugely different at 42 than I do at 48; indeed I believe that there is a veritable chasm between one and the other. They feel like twenty years, not six.
When I look at myself in the mirror, I truly and honestly do not recognise myself, not because I expect to look like I did three decades ago, but rather because life has taken an internal toll I did not foresee or even imagine. I often think that it hardens us, so that many events hurt less because we’ve experienced many versions of the same already, and in others it softens us, so that we are more gentle and accommodating with others, but also to the point of feeling broken down. For many years I considered myself a broadly happy person; now that I know what I know of the world, its immensurable cruelty, its deep-set inequalities, its inexplicable rages, pains, injustices, and its supercilious, relentless, unmovable indifference I find myself thinking that I will never be happy, because the burden of this knowledge is a ball chained to my ankle, and getting heavier by the day. In short, you cannot un-see once you’ve seen.
This is perhaps a slightly left-field message for a day such as today but then, an epiphany is a moment of realisation, generally of something far greater than us ourselves. So it fits, does it not?