I am still going on post-Halloween depression walks on Christmas Eve.
I am always looking for the remnants of Halloween. Not just the forgotten decorations, or the pumpkins still fighting for their place in this world, but also the feelings. The dead leaves. The memories. The smell in the air. The ghost that whispers to me, You didn’t dream it.
It’s so easy to get lost in Christmas, whether you enjoy it or not. I think I do it, too, albeit briefly, but it’s impossible not to when it suffocates the world for so long. This afternoon I found myself watching some Christmas-themed films from my youth, trying to feel something. It’s beaten so far into our heads that we’re supposed to feel something this time of year, that we have to. I lose myself to the desperation and depression. I lose myself to the memories of a childhood that will never return, to feelings I can’t and won’t get back. December is like a funeral…for childhood, for autumn, for different variations of myself.
It is on this desolate walk, Christmas Eve afternoon after marathoning The Polar Express, How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the 2000 version as there is a story behind it that remains dear to my heart no matter how long it’s been since a viewing), and Olive The Other Reindeer, that I find myself once more.
As I walk, the haunting, oddly depressing theme music from The Snowman plays in my head, perhaps because I have been doing my yearly bout of reflection on that film recently, but it seems oddly appropriate. A happy day, but a sad one. A feeling of death and emptiness as I look at the leaves that have turned brown and brittle. I step toward the lake and ask the trees if they remember me, so excited on a late October afternoon. And I can tell that they do, but they are cold and tired now, their colors of a celebration gone by.
The pumpkins I pass feel like grave markers, in a sense. I am proud of them, for still being here. For holding on, despite it all. But the porches feel like cemeteries now. I can distantly feel something that was, but it feels so far away now. As if it never happened at all, and the pumpkins are the only proof that it did. How do they fade into the background now, when they used to rule the world? How can something look so much the same, yet be reduced to almost nothingness, a short two months later?
Sometimes, seeing the remaining pumpkins during Christmas, makes me feel like an amnesiac waking up, snapping back to life. I’m not crazy. This happened. And the life I feel so forced to live for the month of December is not all there is.
There’s a triumph to it, and a melancholy. I remember that Halloween is real, yet I remember how far away it is. I pass the beach and think of my upcoming boss battle with summer. Tomorrow may be Christmas. That pressure will now fade away. But there’s still a whole world, including that scorching, exhausting final lap, between me and Halloween. It’s an end and a beginning, and I pray it won’t feel so long.
There are, also, a couple of forgotten decorations.
As I pass by the clown that has smiled at me for so long now, I wonder what his story is. Are the people who live in this house like me? Can they not bear to part with him? Or was he simply forgotten about? Does anyone else see him as I do, as my heart leaps for just a moment, seeing a part of the world I still recognize as my own? So simple, yet such a beacon of hope.
I wonder how things will look, when Halloween returns again. What will my life be like? Will the same decorations stand in the same now-empty, or now-Christmas-polluted, spots as they did not so long ago?
Autumn has faded into winter, but we keep pushing forward. We come out of our Christmas trance, and start again.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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