Like anything in life, it’s hard to pinpoint when things go awry. But as of the very day itself, this 2024 Christmas season has NOT felt very Christmas-y.

For someone who would easily exchange nine months of every year for that holiday trinity of October/November/December, everything seemed on track. It even snowed a few times in December, which is far from a certainty in central Illinois.

But on Christmas Eve, I found myself standing in HomeGoods, surrounded by chocolate treats and festive decorations and even an acceptable level of human franticness. I had less than an hour before I needed to get ready for the first of three organ gigs and I couldn’t decide on anything to gift my family. I left empty-handed after a half hour of pacing.

Step on the gas, it’s December

“There’s no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There’s no knowing where we’re rowing
Or which way the river’s flowing
Is it raining, is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing? – uh!
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes! The danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they’re certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing!
A-aa-aaa-aaaah!”

• Mr Wonka on Christmas(?)

So, who should I blame for this malaise?

Was it when Thanksgiving dared to encroach on December?

Was it when we canceled our annual trip to Chicago and the Christkindlmarket due to feeling over-traveled?

Was it because we didn’t bring our tree home until the 6th? Or the home office tree that didn’t go up until the week before Christmas?

Was it the sudden doubt and indecisiveness that caused us to flip our Wichita travel plans on their head just weeks before leaving?

Was it something last summer? Did I anticipate my favorite time of year too much?

Play it again (and again, and again, and again)

Or was it when I took on a holiday musical revue with 40+ songs and hundreds of pages of music (or no music at all, forcing improvisation amid a 15-piece orchestra?)

The thing about doing anything professionally is that, to someone merely observing, it looks easy enough. And as that musician, you know it’s not – but the rehearsing eventually makes it as close to effortless as it can get. In this case, we’re manufacturing holiday cheer night after night. You may get the music better and better, but by that point, you’re not hearing the words or feeling the mood. It’s inevitable.

I love playing in ensembles, especially for live musical theater – there’s no doubt there. But the Christmas nature of this show didn’t automatically inject a festive mood into my veins, despite its best effort. Even after playing “Joy To The World” for the fourth time on three different organs, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up holiday music gigs.

I should be used to working more – not less – during this season. I wield the double bragging rights of former photojournalist and current church organist, after all. Maybe I’m just growing soft with age.

It’s the dreaded lurgy!

Or maybe it was the uninvited visitor that knocked on our door a week before Christmas. Amid rehearsals for the above, I started noticing that creeping dread – the one that’s soon followed by an overwhelming need to sleep, an even more powerful inability to sleep, fitful coughing, fevers and enough congestion to work as de facto earplugs. I tried soldiering on with everything (day job, music gig, everyday life) and failed miserably at all some days. No COVID this go around, but man, there’s a million ways to get sick.

Clogging into the night

We live in a lovely two-story house with one shower – a normalcy in the 1930s, but not the general preference in 2024. So while catching up on sleep the day after the holiday musical ended, I barely remember Katie telling me that the bathtub drain wasn’t working. Which I later realized meant that we had a tub full of dirty water and my hope of a shower drowned.

I’ve used enzyme drain cleaner preventatively before and it works great… as long as you remember to use it. I hadn’t, of course, so we were immediately punished two days before Christmas.

Cheapskate I am, I instead paid Mr. Lowes for a bottle of Draino, a bottle of enzyme cleaner AND a hand auger. The first two failed miserably, leaving me a nice caustic soup to Shopvac out of the tub before then performing surgery with the auger. There’s too many turns in the drain pipe to make it easy work, but I lucked out my very first attempt and got about 13-feet back and pulled out a big ball of hair.

Unfortunately, that only got the drain working slowly – so we gratefully have showers yet again, but there’s more work to be done in the new year.

For the record, these are my Christmas demands

Look, I’m a fortunate person to have a whole childhood of lovely memories to try to match as an adult.

Big family gatherings, on both sides in two different states, with plenty of cousins to form de facto Christmas concerts as a kid.

We grew up with a few cassette tapes that contained a mix of Christmas classics – Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, among others. Were they recordings of an 8-track or vinyl compilation? Or a home mix tape by my parents? I should ask…

I love eggnog, but must drink it from a festive mug or glass. Although I drink booze, I still prefer it unadulterated from the grocery store.

Due to a pesky habit we picked up during the depths of the pandemic, we’ve made Hallmark Christmas movies a year-round dirty secret. I’m not proud of it, but there’s structure within this universe that allows one to nearly mark time by predictable plot points. (Have the romantic leads sabotaged their relationship? Has the city life been usurped by the pastoral?)

But real Christmas movies? Like Halloween’s offerings, there’s more than you’ll ever be able to watch. “Holiday Affair” has been at the top since I first saw it a decade or so ago, but I’ll never cut out the mood speedball of “It’s a Wonderful Life” or even “All That Heaven Allows.”

But one of my biggest joys is the art of exterior lighting. And I’m extremely flexible as to what counts as appropriate holiday lighting – it could be a front porch just jammed to the nine’s with fluorescent-tinged LEDs strobing in mismatched synchronization. Or it could be a simple strand of those C9 big, colorful bulbs haphazardly thrown in a front tree. Any effort is perfection!

And so…

I’ve wrapped gifts on Christmas Day just so they can be opened in a few hours. A multitude of cardboard boxes is heading out to the recycling bin as the rain drizzles outside. There’s a mess of sheet music on the living room floor near the tree, marring the picture-perfect view. TCM is on the TV with a Christmas movie marathon in the background.

A quiche in the morning transformed into a ginger-lime roasted chicken with parsnips and Brussels sprouts for dinner. At my request, we hiked a few miles at a nearby forest preserve and the deer outnumbered us humans by a 2:1 margin. Fog came on thick on the twilight drive home, so we detoured a few times to check out neighborhood lights. From our car, a wide array of cheerfulness is visible: professionally-install straight rows of wide lights on roof edges to glowing plastic Santas to nothing at all.

I have no true reason to be blue. In fact, I’m looking forward to the nine-hour journey to Kansas on the 26th. Delayed family festivities await, along with the accompanying ceasefire of regular adult responsibilities. We’ll catch up on sleep, enjoy the mild winter forecasted with possibly with a bonfire, and exchange some fun gifts. It’ll be one of the first times in my life I’ve looked forward to what comes after Christmas – ironically, a throw-back to the 12 Days we only sing about now.

But I can now confirm what many a movie has portrayed over the past century: the lurking specter of Christmas melancholy is very real and among us all.