Recently, where I work, we had a minor shift. It wasn’t much, retirement, promotion and a new person. However, it was almost seismic in a company that has reached an easy, aging equilibrium, and has slowly become a home for aging employees, people come and they stay. And, on the rare occasion an employee leaves before retiring the company roots around in their past and hires his friend, essentially hiring the same person with a new set of quirks. Basically, just Employee A with a couple of deviations. It’s more comfortable.
More ominous, at least to the staid, static concrete fabric the company has managed to develop, there is a new person. Young, bright, friendly in a reserved, almost shy way. Waves of goodwill ripple through the offices. The elevator is filled with the spirit of youthful exuberance, it’s a little unnerving. I thought, but didn’t suggest, we should put her in an isolated office until she ages a little. Let time sand down all of the happy edges, apply a generous coat of indifference and a jaded, tarnished view of the world.
In the business where I work, the holidays are important for the bottom line. The accounting department depends on the hundreds of orders to balance books and settle receipts. It gets busy, hectic and nerves become frayed, and tempers short. We were willing to let the holidays come, drive us to the brink of exhaustion and leave, like the painful memory of a sprained ankle, in time you don’t feel the pain, but you never forget how bad it hurt.
But, things changed.
There was a sign posted in the elevator. “Ugly Christmas Sweater Party.” It had a date and a few, sparse details and was decorated with bitmap reindeers and Santa hats. It promised food, fun and ugliness. And a Christmas tree that had been gathering spiderwebs and dust in the basement made a surprising appearance on the 4th floor. A few trinkets from assorted shelves across the building, decorative, unique writing instruments, wooden, articulated robots, ghosts of the past.
Small, plastic pine trees were scattered across the tables in the break room, it was almost an act of Yuletide vandalism. There was a shock to the system. The ghost of the current holiday season, splayed across doors and walls and tables.
Then came the email. “Everybody should wear something holiday and ugly. Don’t be a Scrooge, think about it.”
I thought about it. And, I replied.
“Scrooge was a tragic hero. He was abandoned by a domineering, cruel father at boarding school year after year during Christmas. He lost his younger sister, a girl he adored. His fiancé left him, leaving him with nothing to love but money. He was a scarred, fragile, frightened human with all emotion buried underneath a vail of anger and loneliness. When he got the chance, when he was shown the eventual darkness of his end he despaired and repented with the rabid abandon of an evangelist called to witness. He became Father Christmas. He said, ‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.’
“It isn’t fair to use such a tortured and pathetic soul to pillory anybody who doesn’t meet your standards of holiday cheer.” I wrote.
“Of course, I agree completely, I just needed a way to express an idea and he is widely held to be an example of anti-Christmas sentiment. I just thought people should wear an ugly sweater. It wasn’t anything personal.”
Monoliths exist in form and fashion and universes that exist in isolation even though they occupy the same space and time. Idols shift from the stone giants of our ancestors to the evergreen trees and silver tinsel of our modern clans. Change is the only permanent thing. And it’s never the same, it unravels and twists and coalesces into something completely different even though it’s exactly the same.
Change has come. It happened so fast it was almost impossible to avoid, a hurricane swooping in on the warming air of carbon based climate change. A destructive, riotous force of holiday joy, striped red and white and green, the camouflage of Christmas, guerrilla forces of the North Pole, creeping in under the rusty, inconsistent concertina wire strung around the perimeter of our ancient and crumbling fort. I’m afraid the ghost of holidays in the future has come to our old building, and it has settled in. It’s wearing an ugly sweater, carrying a plastic cups of eggnog and frosted sugar cookies.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
