Holiday Cheers
Holiday Cheers
Signing off of Zoom meetings
with Canadian or British clients is always fun. “Cheers,” they dryly accent
with their version of salaam or its cognate shalom or their chill
cousin aloha—all words for all seasons. At first this was jarring, but lately
the idea of finishing every interaction with a feigned champagne toast or swirl
of gin—or a nip of eggnog, as the calendar may dictate—has become a fantastic
midday, any day fantasy. Jarring has evolved into shaken-not-stirred. Cheers to
virtual shots with people I’ve never met in person.
Tonight, the night that Joe
Biden signs the Respect for Marriage Act, I received a random text from my Christian
fundamentalist godmother. “Maybe after forty eight years,” I thought, “she’s
calling to acknowledge my gayness in light of the legislative coup, or maybe,”
even more incredibly (I posited to my handsome spouse), “she’s calling for advice
on how to acknowledge the humanity of her own grandchildren who,” through
closed-eyed sleuthing, “she has discovered may also live on the LGBTQ prism.” Wrong
twice, I accepted that she’s from another generation where simply reaching out
to acknowledge my uncomfortable-to-her existence during the holidays is
tantamount to acceptance. Cheers to cross-generational, calling to, “ just let
you know I love you,” and accepting it for the reaching-out that it is.
2022, when even Mitt Romney
voted to acknowledge the universality of love, is a special time in the
immediacy of culture change. Timing is everything. Do Mormons have Godparents?
Cheers to RINOs, endangered as they may be.
I watched the vintage 1964
episode, “How the Flintstones Saved Christmas,” this morning on MeTV onDemand with
a smile on my face and sense that, even for a modern Stone Age family,
there was something to look forward to: even before mid-Century TV censors
forced us to believe in an immaculately conceived Pebbles. Not many things scream
anachronistic (Yabba-dabba-doo!) more loudly than a Flintstone’s Christmas
episode: ptalking pterodactyls flying over shopping malls and gaudily lit,
sugar-cookie-shaped evergreens highlighting a pre-historic cheer that seems
right at home in the glow of cathode rays turned LED pixels. Hinting at parochialism,
such imagined vistas are still, somehow, wholly secular. Such an invoking-and-saving-of
Christmas as if it were just another battle for democracy’s soul in the Cold
War, this “phase right out of (imaginary) history” reminds us that the spirit
of the season isn’t so much Christian as it is American: a stony mix of
optimism, archeology, and myth. If you’re looking, in 2022, for a bedrock of sixties
culture to hold strong against hippies and commies while still upholding
traditional values, look no further than MacyRock’s and an ill-Santa trope. Now, that was something to cheer about. So,
cheers to and Fred and Wilma and Lucy and Desi and Mary and Joseph.
It’s wintertime in America
and for many of us it means we have something to cheer about: even if (for my BabyBoomer
and GenX cohorts) it’s simply that it’s not a Nuclear Winter; the Doomsday
Clock has been static for a couple of years. Cheers to another year, one
hundred seconds til midnight, with fingers a little further away from the red
buttons on the football.
Even the Scroogey-est among
us can find something to cheer for in December of 2022. FSU and UCF football
fans have found ways to cheer out loud and with much gusto—bouncing houses and
war-chanting their ways into the post-season—not every cheer needs to be ground
shaking. But there ain’t nothing wrong with some good ol’ sports cheers. Cheers
to college kids living their dreams and working toward something bigger than
themselves.
It may not be the white
Christmas Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers have been looking forward to, but we
in Florida can cheer for lower humidity and fifties-at-night. Cheers to cool
weather and for bipartisan condemnation of former presidents who break bread
with white supremacists.
Cheers to rebuilding in the
wake of Ian and Nicole.
Cheers to “Respect for”
displacing “Defense of.”
Cheers to spunky and
irascible Ukraine for staving off World War III so far.
Cheers to Elon Musk for
SpaceX and Tesla and batteries and StarLink.
Cheers to reducing carbon emissions. Cheers to dunes
and sea walls and mangroves and building codes.
Cheers to friends around the world. Cheers to a moonshot and beyond.
Cheers to 1776 and 1787 and
the Declarations and Constitutions that created us.
Cheers to 1865 and 1954 and 1968 and the Amendments and
overturnings and Acts that righted our trajectory.
Cheers to 1969 and 2013 and
2022 (today!) and the Riots and Decisions and Laws that codified love as a
right.
Cheers to our founding generations, our grandparents, our godparents, our siblings and all of their kids and progeny.
Cheers to getting this all
jumbled together in a single shot of future-looking nostalgic positivism tied
together by nine hundred words that spanned from prehistory to the brink of
2023 in the Common Era. There will be plenty of cynics who’d rather dwell on war
and inflation and culture conflicts and I’ll let them have their spaces (cheers
to the multiverse of ideas). As for me (and you): Rest up, take an Aleve, and
drink a gallon of water before bed because we have 365 days of 2023 to start
cheers-ing to.
Cheers: Salaam: Shalom: Aloha:
God Bless us, every one.
Read more essays, poetry, and short stories at Momentitiousness.com
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