We Have a Million Items in Our Gift Guide! They're All Salad!
Honestly, what else does anyone need? (Also, we don't actually have a gift guide).
SALAD IS SUCH A GIFT, isn’t it?
Seriously, if I had children, every single holiday would be nothing but a big salad party. I’d stuff their stockings with dark frilly greens and ruby pomegranate seeds. When they cracked open their birthday piñatas, avocados, red onion slices, and grapefruit would come tumbling out. I’d ask them to Be My Valentine with a box of fancy mangoes or artichokes. At Easter, we’d make egg salad.
I imagine it’s a good thing I do not have children, and not just because they’d grow up weird. I’d surely be considered a suspect parent, thanks, at least in part, to my unconventional feelings about holidays.
In particular, I’m Thanksgiving- and Christmas-averse. This might be construed as unfriendly in polite society, but the truth is my wish to escape rather than participate in the season has less to do with the holidays and what they are meant to represent—which I am very glad so many people in the world find comfort and joy in—than with the fact that they coincide with a family tragedy from over a decade ago that permanently broke my flimsy heart. Avoidance has always been how I’ve coped.
But it has gradually become absolutely freeing to realize I’m allowed to do whatever makes me happiest this time of year rather than trying to hew to traditional, longstanding, capitalistic, culturally dictated norms that require gift giving under duress and showing up and smiling even if your heart is breaking all over again, just from remembering.
I realize that I just sounded quite bah-humbug, but that’s truly not how I feel.
Even though I am not at my best this time of year, obviously, I love nothing more than giving random gifts in August or March, simply because I saw something I thought you might like. And nothing makes me happier when someone does the same for me. Plus, here in the thick of what I now merrily refer to as my least favorite time of the year (sung to the tune of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”), I also love a lot of the coincidental holiday-season hullabaloo all around me: the over-the-top Christmas lights and menacingly jolly music; the giant outdoor creches/mangers and menorahs. I love church candlelight services, which I will attend, despite the fact that I’m not religious, with anyone who asks me, and openly weep as we all sing beautiful, hopeful hymns that imagine peace on earth and good will toward men.