December can be a bit of a nightmare for me. It’s festive as fuck, but I have a trifecta of celebrations to get through and they put a lot of pressure on me. It starts with my birthday, then Christmas, then New Year’s. Each one comes with its own set of expectations as well as a wave of crippling nostalgia for celebrations gone by mixed with trepidation for the next one. Let’s begin with my birthday.
I absolutely love my birthday. It’s something I only really have good memories of. Lots of family traditions, like putting up certain (now very old) decorations or going out with my dad to some ludicrously expensive restaurant. However, as I’ve gotten older, each consequent birthday has become less important. They feel like merely markers for another year that’s passed me by. I still enjoy my birthday, but the magic is gone and it’s been replaced by something much less fun. Each year I try to recapture a bit of that magic but it’s impossible. I don’t feel depressed about it, just a little down.
This year has been particularly significant because I’ve turned 27, and that has always been a mystical age for me because of the 27 Club. The ‘club’ consists of musicians who died at the same age, and many of its ‘members’ are some of my favourite artists, such as Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Alan Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain. I don’t fully understand the weirdly morbid perversion I have with these tragic figures. Maybe it’s the fact that their lives that were cut short, like John Lennon or Chris Cornell, and I can’t let go of the notion that there could have been so much more music from these people. When I think about someone like Jim Morrison, I can’t really comprehend that he died at the same age I am now. I know it’s silly to compete with some of the most well-known musical artists of all time, but we’re at the same chapter of our lives yet they managed to achieve greatness beyond all measure and I’m sitting here naked in my office writing this post because I suddenly had an idea at 2am. Paul McCartney and George Harrison were 27 when The Beatles broke up, which means they’d done all of that stuff and finished as a band at this age.
After getting over my birthday blues, I then have to face Christmas. When I was a kid, I’d put out carrots and cookies for Father Christmas and his reindeer, and maybe a glass of wine too actually now that I think about it. In the morning, there would be bites out of all the food – and an empty glass. There would always be at least one present with special wrapping paper that came from Santa himself. It was magical, and even when I started to understand he wasn’t real, the present from him persisted. I used to tear open these giant boxes and they’d be filled with Lego sets and chocolate. As I got older, they pivoted to video games. I remember the Christmas when I got an Xbox 360, and I remember when I first got Halo 3. I remember getting Fallout New Vegas – there’s a video of me unboxing it somewhere too. All these moments were so exciting, and they meant so much to me. At 27, presents are basically just gift cards or money. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, but they lack magic. I now cherish the meaningful gifts that were thought about – that’s probably why I appreciate well written cards too because the words hold magic that a gift card can’t.
Christmas comes and goes, and we’re left with New Year’s Eve. It’s supposed to be a major celebration, but all I feel is the burden of needing to have a good time. There’s this notion that when it becomes January 1st, everything is reset and we get to try again. But nothing resets, and life continues. We say goodbye to the previous year, but it hasn’t disappeared. We reflect on what was left undone, the things we didn’t do or the things that we lost. We promise ourselves that the next year will offer more opportunity, and that we will seize them, but we never do. The alternative seems to just let yourself be ignorant to the reality of it and drink yourself silly through the December period so you just stumble through until you wake up in the next year and everyone is back at work and you can just carry on as normal without having to shoulder any of the weight for the previous year nor the expectations and promises of the next. All I can think about is the failed relationships and the people who let me down and the people I let down and how it will happen again and again each year. I still get dreams, nightmares really, of people from my past. I still think about people who have well and truly moved on. I still feel I’ve failed and that I will never achieve enough to get over that feeling.
So yeah, that’s why December is a bit of a nightmare for me.