Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Wishing everyone a bright and happy holiday, in spite of the darkness.

Unemployed workers in front of a shack with Christmas tree, East 12th Street, New York City, 1938. (Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration/The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library)

IT WOULD BE DISHONEST to claim that the darkness has not tried its best to consume me at many points over the last four years, particularly the last one.

Too often, it has felt ever-present as human beings across the globe — children, families, the elderly — have endured starvation, displacement, senseless wars and violent attacks in more countries than I can count on one hand, under the authority of leaders who, on all sides, seem incapable of achieving anything more historically notable than cavalier brutality. In some places, women have been callously silenced and barred from accessing education, health care, travel and work. Literacy and independence will become foreign concepts to most of their daughters, who will likely never realize their full potential, even as adults, through no fault of their own.

Closer to home, a higher standard of living feels increasingly out of reach and still-soaring prices mean families often struggle to afford necessities like food, rent, vehicle repairs and medicine — even those earning more than minimum wage. Children continue to kill each other, and themselves, for reasons no one will try to understand. Homelessness is on the rise, and entire communities have been erased by historic flooding. Families and relationships have dissolved over political differences amplified by algorithms. All the while, secrecy runs rampant and unexplained aircraft hover over the nation’s cities, leaving many on edge and wondering what’s next.

If there were a definitive word for the times we live in, surely it would be bleak. And on this Christmas morning — in this season of joy and light — it’s hard not to think of those enduring the worst of it. Who are we to be happy, when there is so much darkness in this world?

Still, it’s important to remember that the world isn’t all bad — there is light all around us. People still fall in love every day; stories are still written that will outlast their authors; babies are still being born to excited young couples. At least one of them will change the world someday.

Parents still cry as their teenagers leave for college to begin their adult lives. Teachers still make a difference in the lives of their students, and somewhere, probably in this very moment, a surgeon is saving someone’s life as their loved ones say prayers of gratitude. In a soup kitchen somewhere this morning, someone with a kind heart is spending Christmas serving the poor. And in the year ahead, someone will be reunited with a lost love. Someone else will visit the Eiffel Tower, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal and Nara Park for the first time after dreaming of it their entire lives. Across the globe, something good will happen every second.

Personally, even after one of the most chaotic and difficult years of my life so far, I am sitting in a peaceful room, about to take a sip of hot, fresh coffee while gazing at a glowing Christmas tree decorated with ornaments that bring back the warmest memories of my beautiful grandparents, while preparing for Christmas morning mass. If that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

Maybe it is as Dickens wrote in his beloved novella, A Christmas Carol — published at a time when Christmas was enjoying a revival among early Victorian city-dwellers during a bleak era of poverty, illness and displacement: “It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”

Can we change the world with our laughter, with our joy? Call me an optimist, but I suspect we can. As Dickens wrote, darkness is cheap. On this Christmas Day, in these dark times, I hope you can find — and delight in — the light, even if the only place you can find it is shining dimly within yourself.

Merry Christmas!

— E.