Christmas is a tough time for me.

Like a lot of depressives, I am mostly likely to feel blue around special times of the year. (Really not looking forward to my 40th birthday in May.)

And the sad truth is, the times when others are happiest are often the most difficult for us sad and broken souls. The pressure levels alone are enough to make people lunge for their Xanax. And those of us who come from troubled families often have less that wonderful memories of supposedly special days.

(Not me, though. My family always pulled themselves together for holidays and birthdays. )

But the real trial is having nobody to spend a special day with, and for me, that special day is Christmas Day. (Well, plus Christmas Eve. )

My family are all far, far away, and I have no way of getting to them. And my friends all have families close by to celebrate the day with, so I can’t do it with them.

So that leaves me all alone on a day when I probably should not be alone at all, mental health wise.

But I am making a plan. I will go see The Hobbit in glorious 48 frames per second, and buy popcorn and snacks, and settle in for three hours of escapist fun.

That should help ease the pain until it is time to go to Joe’s family Christmas dinner. Joe’s family is nice enough to have me over every year, and that is definitely a lifeline for me.

Without that… I really have no idea what would become of me. I would probably have to check myself in to the outpatient ward at the hospital, or something. Assuming they are not already overbooked this time of the year. There are a lot of broken people like me in this world and we all might need a little extra help not hurting ourselves when things get really bad this time of year.

Normally, I am not that type of depressive. I don’t talk a lot about wanting to harm myself. I don’t end up in the mental ward for doing crazy things. I don’t end up in jail for hurting others.

I am way too sensible and smart and in control for all that shit. And shy, and passive. The more dramatic expressions of depression would all be too overt and active for me. I need all my energies to just cling to my passive and pathetic place in the world. Hurting myself would be drawing attention to myself, and making myself a burden on others, and that simply will not do. I am not allowed to do any of those things.

I am supposed to just disappear and not draw attention to myself. You see why it is so hard for me to get help, don’t you? It is hard for me to even ask.

It’s hard to ask for help when you are not even supposed to exist.

So this is not the most wonderful time of the year for me. And yet, I still love Christmas.

Why? Because Christmas is a wonderful time of the year, despite all the headaches and the commercialism and the stress and the depression.

Christmas represents many of my most cherished ideals, such as kindness, compassion, closeness, and camaraderie. And I am saying this as someone who has absolutely no experience of religion. Christmas has only ever had a secular meaning to me, and I cherish that meaning.

And it is because I cherish that meaning that I fiercely cling to Christmas despite the temptation to give in to cynicism and become jaded and harsh towards it.

I can see why people do it. When Christmas stops being good for you, the most natural thing in the world is to be bad to to it. To reject it, and deride it, and push it away from yourself. To claim Christmas is “meaningless” or “too commercial” or “fake” or whatever. To complain about how everything becomes Christmas related this time of year, even though you personally hate Christmas.

I mean, how dare they continue to celebrate a wonderful holiday filled with love and warmth and closeness when it clearly bothers you?

How insensitive can you get?

Yet I reject all of that. Sure, my Christmas is not pleasant. I would have every reason to turn on Christmas. It makes me depressed enough to be worried about my self-safety, for crying out loud.

But despite all that, it is something that brings joy and wonder and pleasure and real closeness to billions of people worldwide. The fact that it does not happen to do that for me does not matter. I am not that selfish or self-absorbed. Christmas is wonderful, and I feel that if I was to start crapping on it, I would be crapping on all the genuine goodness it brings to millions of others.

And why would I do that? Just to make myself feel better? How pathetically limited and selfish that would be. I do not believe in making other people feel worse in order to make myself feel better. That is acceptable, it seems, to a lot of other people in this world, but it is not acceptable to me.

And if the only way to feel better is to make someone else feel worse, then I will suffer.

Besides, I have faith that there are as many ways to make yourself feel better by making others feel better as there are the other way around, and it is pretty clear to me which way is better.

And not just ethically… spiritually as well. It does you good to do good. It makes you like yourself more and give you a great deal of positive feeling to reflect upon, and hence makes the world seem like a warmer and more pleasant place.

I am not sure exactly what my contribution to the happiness of the world will be (funny novels?), but I am determined to follow the path of mutual profit and not the path of zero sum.

And isn’t that what Xmas is all about?