I take it as accepted that Christmas – for some at least – can be a moderate though palpable emotional burden. It is an open door for mawkishness of every description, involving the always rousing traits of ardour called loneliness, old age or generally any other form of psychic or material decomposition to be contrasted with the exuberance and plenitude of Santa Claus. Meanwhile the images of a flying sleigh and tiny reindeer and the sparkling star in the East nourish the lustre of one’s tears.
The acme of the difficulty normally surrounds Christmas Eve and Christmas Day after which there is customarily a united though precipitous roller coaster return to clarity and the usual patterns of temperate living on Boxing Day. It is this triumvirate of fervency and sentimentality which occupies the weeks of preparation and anticipation leading to their fulfillment. It is especially difficult for mothers, grandparents, religious fanatics and children to endure the events leading up to and including the three days (a numeric significance common throughout the period though for very different reasons but all equally speculative).
Boxing Day brings welcome recovery. Though, as with relief from any pain, the recovery is as discernible as the loss, a reminder that joy and pain are both fictions. The convalescence – or reclamation (to choose a less injurious prescription) – is usually so abrupt as to constitute an unanticipated immediacy. Not that everything falls off the edge of the world; but things suddenly become far less clouded or ornamented. The restoration of the sublimity of stoicism is its own invisible analgesic. Shamefully perhaps, as the hour approached midnight last evening long after our dinner guest had excused himself to undertake the chilly walk in the snow to his residence on the Island, and while I was alone in the dark in the drawing room among the debris of the occasion, I cleared the Christmas cards and tuquèd Teddy Bear and freakish jester marionette from the console, systematically restoring them for another year to the second drawer and replacing the family photos on the mantle among the traditional wooden accessories, a return to normal.
In a speech delivered on May 14, 1920, Harding proclaimed that America needed “not nostrums, but normalcy”. Two months later, during a homecoming speech, Harding reaffirmed his endorsement of “normal times and a return to normalcy.”
World War I and the Spanish flu had upended life, and Harding said that it altered the perspective of humanity. He argued that the solution was to seek normalcy by restoring life to how it was before the war. Harding’s conception of normalcy for the 1920s included deregulation, civic engagement, and isolationism. He rejected the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the activism of Theodore Roosevelt, favoring the earlier isolationist policy of the United States.
Detractors of the time tried to belittle the word “normalcy” as a neologism as well as a malapropism, saying that it was poorly coined by Harding, as opposed to the more accepted term normality. There was contemporaneous discussion and evidence that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857. According to some historians, normalcy was an “obscure math term” before its use by Harding during the campaign. Harding, a newspaper editor, addressed the issue of the word’s origin, claiming that normalcy but not normality appeared in his dictionary.
Harding prominently featured his dog Laddie Boy in the press to instill the domestic image associated with his vision of normalcy.
Harding’s position attracted support during the 1920 presidential election, winning 60.3% of the popular vote.
My further suspicion is that much of the turmoil leading up to the period December 24th – 26th is a product of worry associated with meeting expectations or not. The so-called holiday season (which, by the way, I prefer to label instead as the Winter Solstice because I think it has more historic authenticity as the initial promotion of the period on our calendar rather than pretending to identify the exact day of birth of Jesus Christ whose family name by contrast is utterly lost in the contributing mythical features) is fraught with ambitions for all sides of our ofttimes impenetrable psychological nature, whether to prove adoration, magnanimity, remembrance, importance or apology. It is by any assessment a period corsé of the social calendar.
The sudden return (by mid-Boxing Day) to whatever we were before is no doubt substantially welcome because so little if anything remains to be done – other than clearing up the mess, putting things away and out of sight, re-attending whatever one usually does on a blank holiday, devoting time to oneself instead of others, having the privilege to think only of leftovers for dinner (lunch is out of the question) and putting aside the remaining cookies for another time, hopefully removed from our surfacing athletic and dietary goals. And maybe we’ll be hedonistic enough to devote our leisure attention to the upcoming New Year’s Eve celebrations. But before we mistakenly extend the complication, we have this – albeit narrow – avenue of casualness and restraint, removed from the anxiety or other perturbances of gifts, drinking or eating.
The affiliation with isolationism is accordingly both understandable and tolerable. It illustrates the antithesis of over-exertion and accommodation. Though the recovery period smacks of limitation and removal, it is but a temporary confinement. Once the ether is allowed to rest and to recover itself, vigour is reactivated. Certainly there can be too much of a good thing; but so too is it as predictable that we seldom abandon our social convictions howsoever wearing we may for the moment find them to be. The exhaustion of energy is not a criticism of the initial act of gusto; rather is is a measure of its verve.
Ether (also aether) a very rarefied and highly elastic substance formerly believed to permeate all space, including the interstices between the particles of matter, and to be the medium whose vibrations constituted light and other electromagnetic radiation.