Holiday depression linked to other people

This time of year, every publication seems to have an article on holiday depression:  How to prevent it, or, if it’s already too late, how to overcome it. This barrage of depression information is starting to deliver a not-so-subliminal message to our national unconscious. 

I get depressed after reading that I should be depressed because it points out to me that I’m not depressed, which depresses me because if everyone else is depressed, shouldn’t I be depressed, too?

What’s wrong that there’s nothing wrong with me?!

It’s like the time when you happen to be frowning in thought and someone sees your frown and asks what’s wrong. “Nothing,” you reply in surprise. “Why? Do I seem upset?” Your surprised tone is mistaken for defensiveness and the person who observed your frown tells three other people you’re having a bad day.

“A little upset, are we?” one asks a bit later. “No,” you insist, peeved that no one seems to have anything better to do than incorrectly monitor your moods. Like clockwork, the second person suggests maybe you should take a break.

“But I don’t need a break,” you say, legitimately annoyed. “I’m FINE.” And that response is reported to the third person, who later asks who peed in your Cheerios that morning.

Now you’re officially mad, not to mention repulsed. “Just leave me alone!” you cry. So they do. Many a holiday hermit got his start this way.

While official theory asserts holiday depression is caused by isolation and internal stressors, I beg to differ. As illustrated in the above example, most depression is anger turned inward. And it’s often directly attributable to the presence of the people in your life, their level of stupidity, and their unreasonable expectations, all of which are at societal peak levels from November 15-January 1.

Everyone knows this is true, even if it’s not politically correct to admit. So let me publicly acknowledge it here for you.

Truth told, people who live alone are probably the happiest during the holidays. For obvious reasons. You never see them camped outside Best Buy at 3 AM, hoping to get a great deal on one of only five per store $300 laptop computers for an undeserving spouse who will never end up using it. And they’re not up all night, either, making fudge and frosting sugar cookies that steer loved ones toward early diabetic graves. Nope, they are home sleeping peacefully. Alone.

You never see allegedly isolated people swearing at the postal clerk for running out of Madonna and Christ Child stamps, which forces them to paste their Christmas card and newsletter envelopes with secular snowmen. The so-called lonely are never caught in stores fighting over the last loaf of cocktail rye, candy thermometer, bottle of Bailey’s, or latest toy, allegedly toward generating holiday happiness.

Many cases of depression get their holiday toehold in Thanksgiving, when people (I really mean “women”) work from sundown the day before through sunrise the day of, cooking and cleaning for an ungrateful cast of relatives who are just there, anyway, because your TV is bigger.

There’s something about sitting on a mechanically compromised folding chair, straddling the leg of an overcrowded holiday table, listening to uninformed political commentary over soggy green bean casserole, that darkens one’s outlook. The black dog of depression always makes an appearance, invited or not. Bad dog!

I’m guessing your mental picture of some poor, isolated soul, plunked alone in front of the TV on a holiday is looking less bleak. Remember, his frozen pizza requires a lot less preparation and cleanup. Plus, he controls the remote.

Armchair pizza dude without family and friends to consider is also immune to the aftershock of secondary holiday depression, which hits after the credit card bills and extra holiday food pounds catch up in January.

In case my message isn’t clear: Do-gooders should think twice about interrupting the reverie of someone you’ve labeled “isolated.” The last thing they may need is someone depressed stopping by with pseudo holiday cheer and a fattening holiday meal. They’ll smell a mile away that you’re just there for a momentary reprieve from your own holiday chaos. Sparing them is the right thing to do.

Lowly vegetable dish won cooking contest

The minute I asked my second-grader, Connor, to stir something for me on the stove, he started asking for a chef’s hat. “But Mom,” he pleaded, “If I just had the right equipment, I could do this better.”

I smiled and shook my head. That coveting of tools thing sure starts early for guys. I wondered briefly if Craftsman or Snap-On made a chef’s hat. Whole industries have been constructed around the illusion that acquisition of the perfect tool is all that stands between men and mechanical competence.

But that’s not the direction this is headed.

“Cooking should come naturally for you,” I told Connor, showing him how to figure-eight stir the thickening pie filling. “For eight years ago this month I was pregnant for you when I won the Kalamazoo Gazette’s annual cooking contest.”

His eyes narrowed and shoulders drooped resignedly in synchronization with the faraway look that entered my eyes. I pretended his sigh was consent to continue the story he’d already heard at least a hundred times.

“I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when the cooking contest rolled around,” I ignored his eye rolling. “Contractions had started, so I baked my entry early in case someone else had to take it for me.” Connor lip-synched this part with me.

“The fate of the free world was riding on my bourbon pecan carrots taking first prize,” I threw in for good measure.

“Mom, just skip to the part where you came home and took a picture of our dog eating the remainder of the grand prize winner,” he interrupted. “That’s the best part.” But to me, there were lots of best parts, beginning with my previous year’s performance.

In 1999, my buttermilk bleu cheese biscuits had won the bread division. I put the accompanying herb butter into a small, carved-out pumpkin because judges like that kind of nauseating touch.

My biscuits advanced to the finals, where they were bested by other category winners, like at a Best in Show finale at a canine competition. The winner made a special 25-ingredient chowder using products from her native country. My mutt biscuits couldn’t lick her soup bowls.

That year I had also entered pecan-topped carrots, but they had been rejected during the recipe read-only part of the contest. So the following year I tacked “bourbon” onto the title, tossed a couple of shots into the recipe, and re-entered them. They staggered into the semi-finals under the influence of Old Crow. Apparently, the alcohol made them look better around closing time.

My own giddiness propelled me to the bank with my $300 prize-winning check. I purchased I-series bonds for Connor, born five days post-contest. Receiving compensation and public recognition for cooking, a thankless job I do every day, was more gratifying than my garden-variety vegetable dish having beaten out much higher brow entries.

It felt every bit as good as winning a cleaning contest, which will never happen.

What I hadn’t bargained for was the Gazette dispatching a photographer and reporter to my home to capture follow-up shots of me in action and to learn my culinary secrets. What secrets?! That I was a gourmet pretender?

I wasn’t exactly thrilled about being photographed during the last month of my pregnancy. Did I mention I also wore braces at the time? And that I had never finished the kitchen wallpapering job I had begun six years earlier? My biggest apron barely fastened around my enormous belly. The photographer shot around it and the missing section of wallpaper.

There was no dodging the braces, which were as irritating as the reporter who doubled as the Gazette food editor. He insisted on labeling me a “foodie,” a pretentious term he glowingly used to describe himself: Someone who lives and breathes for new recipes, cooking, and dining experiences.

I disagreed and countered that I was really more of a “cook the basics to feed the family on a budget” type. Nevertheless, his article described me as a “self-professed foodie.”

My phrase for him was “self-aggrandized phony.” Nevertheless, the I-Bonds are still collecting interest. A triumph for lowly vegetable dishes and ordinary people! E-mail me if you want the bourbon pecan carrots recipe, which is seriously good.

Accidents refuse to happen when needed

I clipped another deer along J Drive South the other night, just two months after getting my car back from the body shop. I’d just slowed down to avoid two others, so I was only back up to 35-40 mph when my bumper grazed the tail end of her tail end. All it did was chip the new paint.

Shoot. If I were someone who cared about the appearance of my car, that might have bugged me. Instead, it was just another bug on windshield. Annoying. More annoying was the absence of damage.

Coming off a recent comp claim, a second round of similar damage to my 130,000-mile car might lead to “totaling.” That formerly dreaded word is now a welcome possibility since learning my credit union loan insurance pays off totaled vehicles in full, plus supplies $1,000 toward my next vehicle down payment. Yee haw!

I’m considering mounting some deer repellent whistles backward on the bumper of my car in hope of attracting another deer. But accidents refuse to happen when you most need them.

As sure as a backseat umbrella guarantees it won’t rain, my car needing a major brake job on Monday guarantees nothing bad will happen to it beforehand. However, shelling out substantial repair bucks greatly increases the odds I will hit a buck afterward, perhaps on the way home from Tuffy.

My father purchased but one new vehicle his entire life: A shiny Ford he babied and parked in his parents’ barn at night. Apparently the upstairs floor of the building had been monitoring his actions and weakening over time for just that occasion (reference my previous column about buildings, vehicles and appliances conspiring against their owners), for the floor fell and flattened his car beneath tons of corn, crushing his pride along with it.

My 1999 Saturn, likely the only new vehicle I will ever own, suffered a similar fate. An oil change shop in Portage put the wrong filter on at its first oil change. All the oil leaked out overnight and the engine blew 15 minutes into my drive the next day. Although they replaced the engine for free, I was left wondering why this had happened at 3,000 miles and not 103,000 miles?! It just wasn’t fair.

Friends were aghast when I continued to patronize that oil change place. How could I not when they treated me like royalty afterward and gave me a boatload of free oil changes? When’s the last time a service manager shined your shoes? Felt darned good.

Years ago, when my high mileage Geo Prism was nearing its twilight years but still fully insured, the alternator went out along US-131, at the entrance ramp to 28^th Street during rush hour. You couldn’t construct a better set-up for an aging vehicle you wanted to get creamed. I happily hiked for a wrecker, visualizing the twisted wreckage we’d return to.

Nope, just a hefty repair bill and several days’ inconvenience. You can’t buy an accident when you desperately need one.

That’s not altogether true. When we lived in Kalamazoo, someone anonymously bashed the passenger side door of our leased truck with one of those large, flat carts at a home improvement store. We were sick about it, knowing we would get bashed, too, at lease end.

Next time I had the truck in at the dealership for routine maintenance, the service manager came rushing into the customer lounge. “Mrs. Smith,” he said in a surgeon’s dramatic tone. “I’m afraid we have some bad news.”

He breathlessly related that the passenger door of our truck had been smashed. They had dropped the truck off the hoist as they were lowering it, which had so unnerved the young service technician he had driven into a cement post while backing it out. “Don’t worry,” the service manager reassured, “Our body shop will fix everything.”

I kept a straight face while silently rejoicing. “It’s okay, really. No problem,” I intoned, Zenlike. “Sometimes these things happen.”  The rest of the customers marveled at my calm and generous spirit. Little did they know a dangerous precedent had been set that would someday have me whistling Dixie backward for deer.

Hidden prayer life a real eye-opener

One Sunday during church I felt familiar pain. There was something in my eye. What was it? The plank I need to remove before diagnosing someone else’s splinter? While that could be, it felt more like an eyelash.

For storytelling purposes, the foreign object was not nearly as interesting as what it opened my eyes to: hidden prayer life, or what really goes on when heads are bowed and eyes closed in church.

First some background. For the longest time during childhood, I did not realize you could open your eyes while swimming underwater. It just never occurred to me. I can remember watching some older kids diving for rings while I was swimming in a hotel pool on a family vacation.

“But how can they find them?” I asked my older sister, who was dumbfounded I was too stupid to know you could swim with your eyes open. I guess I assumed that because I operated with closed eyes, everyone else did, too.

Being a loving sibling, my sister broadcast my ignorance to everyone within earshot.

In my defense, I had very sensitive eyes back then. I also had an uncontrollable bladder release problem that seemed to be exacerbated by chlorinated water. At least I was smart enough not to announce that.

My hidden prayer life epiphany mirrored my swimming pool puzzlement. I assumed that because I always bow my head and pray as instructed by the pastor, everyone else does, too. But that was just wearing my ignorance on the sleeve of my Sunday best.

The day I used prayer time to dab the foreign object from my eye was eye opening in many ways. After capturing the renegade lash on a folded tissue, I looked around, blinking, struggling to re-focus my watery vision.

While time did not allow for an accurate headcount and subsequent computations, I’d guess 15-20 percent of the congregation was doing something other than praying. This fact struck my radar screen like an unexpected bird flying into a car windshield. Whap!!!

A 50ish man was furiously cleaning his fingernails with the edge of his church bulletin, a teenage couple wordlessly flirting. Heads of larger families were writing out checks for the collection plate. Probably the only time they had to do it. Perhaps they were bill paying. I couldn’t say for sure. Parents with small children were silently gesturing them into submission.

An older woman was using the time not to contemplate the meaning of faith, but to deeply probe the recesses of her purse. Finding a handkerchief, she then repeated the process with her nose. A middle-aged woman tugged at the waistline of her dress, then reached up under her hemline to readjust the half-slip that had migrated upward. A younger woman applied concealer to a fast-forming zit on her chin.

Everyone was so busy with their respective acts they didn’t notice me watching. What they had in common was that they were counting on people like me to keep my head lowered so they could anonymously pursue their various missions. Does that make it missionary work?

Quickly bowing my head again before more church members could forfeit their dignity, I wondered how long these things had been happening. I had been so busy praying through church services that I had no inkling such activities went on during prayer. It was the swimming pool scenario all over again, absent the chlorine-induced incontinence.

I wanted to tell someone, but couldn’t without revealing that I, too, had been less than reverent in church. Don’t you hate that? A few years ago I addressed a similar issue at home, with potential bathroom snoopers. I taped the following sign inside my medicine cabinet:

“What kind of sicko would snoop in other people’s medicine cabinets? Close the door and look in the mirror. There’s your answer, you pathetic, voyeuristic excuse for a person. You want to tell someone you read this, but you can’t without revealing your true nature. See how screwed up life gets when you need to get a life?! Shame on you.”

So far, no one has mentioned reading the sign. Shame on all of us.