Thursday 21 December 2000

Pic of the day: Deck the malls! (Archive photo.) But can money buy love? Or even release the soul from the Purgatory of ...

Holiday blues?

On the train to Oslo, a kind of melancholy grew on me. Or perhaps more a sense of futility. Why do I even bother doing this? Why didn't I just stay at home? It's just wasting money, and no one really appreciates it.

***

A few words about the family I'm visiting. I am trying to not name them in such a way that total strangers will recognize them, but some background history is in place. When I was young, the family had a reputation for being rather well off. Not exactly upper class, but then again the upper class in Norway is so small that you can know them all by name (and you probably do if you read the right papers) and even so they are not exactly American level upper class. The most common people aspire to is upper middle class. This guy had a nice car and a nice house and a heap of children. I think the children too genuinely believed that they were well off.

But bills come due sooner or later. Despite much flailing from the family father, they have been downward mobile ever since. They're still middle class (as are almost all Norwegians) but the next generation now sticks almost exclusively to the clothes shops that they ridiculed when I was young. Most of them have moved out and are, I think, feeding themselves. Their mother is working too, now. They're just ordinary people living ordinary lives, trying to make ends meet.

But I won't cry for yesterday,
there's an ordinary world
somehow I have to find.
And as I try to make my way
to the ordinary world
I will learn to survive...

Duran duran: Ordinary world

Still, and this may just be all in my head, I occasionally wonder if they really know how hard money is to come by. For ordinary people. Though I guess they may have learned it by now.

***

It's not like the average American is not confronting similar problems, from what I read. Even here in Norway, Christmas has been heavily commercialized, but we're still lagging after our great idol in this area. I understand that it is common there to buy horribly expensive gifts, with one's credit card, and then resent it and each other for the whole holiday. "Holiday hell" as Psychology Today called the season.

As one of king Solomon's PR people put it: "If someone would give everything in his house for love, he would only be scorned." We can't buy or sell affection. What is freely given must be freely accepted. This is, after all, the true spirit of the holidays.

"Hell is the others" said the philosopher Sartre. He had a whole screenplay by that name, in which a small group of people died and went to hell. Actually they went to an apartment, where they were left alone together, and made hell for one another. No pitchforks, no fiery pits. Just a fine selection of grating personalities. That's the kind of hell some people are experiencing in the holidays too.

***

Needless to say, any traces of melancholy disappeared at the sight of the radiant young girl who I call Cutie. She is still as beautiful as ever, and still as charming and considerate. She is just so absolutely cute, like a big baby without the crying. Plus, she had lots of pictures from New York and Washington.

And tomorrow we are bound to go shopping. Woo hoo! :) Plus, bonus extra: The return of the legendary SuperWoman!

Entries are likely to be posted at weird times throughout the holidays.