Pre-Christmas Thoughts

In a few days, it will be Christmas. I’ve talked about Christmas movies before [scroll though the lists of past blogs and take a read] but notice, as you look at the TV listings for any December, how ubiquitous they are. The re-runs of classics, sure, but also a huge number of Christmas movies that you’ve never heard of. There are TONS of Christmas movies out there—ones made for the screen and ones made for TV.

Why?

I think part of it is that holiday time is full of happiness and hope. Sure, it’s full of crazy shopping and overeating, but the bigger things are happiness and hope. Christmas movies are happy either in the present or looking back into the past, where they’re full of nostalgia. And Christmas movies offer happy endings, don’t they? You’re hard-pressed to find a Christmas movie without that happy ending. And those happy endings give us hope that things can work out, that despite all the trials and tribulations that the characters in the film had to endure, the bottom line is that their future is now hopeful.

Movies. They make life seem so easy, don’t they?

But life isn’t a movie. And life can be hard.

Where are you this holiday season? Are you happy and hopeful? Or just the opposite.

I think the holidays are particularly unhappy for many of us. If we’re alone, if we’re in an unhealthy relationship—with people or substances—the holidays can underline the hopelessness of everything, and NOT the hope.

And I think writers are particularly prone to these feelings. Why? Because most writers feel things very deeply. That’s what writers do. And how to explain that to the non-writer seems almost impossible. Though I did try once—with my mother.

My mother was not well educated, having left school in the 7^th grade. And she said to me once, “Where do all those stories come from anyway?” So. How to explain that to someone who doesn’t write. So here’s how that conversation went:

ME: OK, well imagine you’re on a bus. You look at the people around you, and what do you think? Maybe there’s a man across the aisle from you… don’t you wonder what he does for a living, where he’s going, what his life is like, etc., etc.?

Mom looked at me oddly.

ME: That’s how stories come—you imagine things about someone and write them down. So think about it, when you’re on that bus and see that man across the aisle, what do you imagine about him?

MOM: Well… I just look at him and think what a big nose he has.

I remember looking at her in amazement. So that’s how normal people saw the world? They didn’t imagine stories everywhere they looked?

Now, not everybody’s as surface-oriented as my mom was, but that was one of the first times I realized that I saw the world a bit differently than many people—that I imagined worlds that others didn’t. That there was something about being a writer that made you see the world differently. OR, there was something about seeing the world differently that made you a writer.

So while I hope this is a great holiday season for you, if it isn’t, use that imagination and write something about how it could be… if not for you, for someone else. Tell a story and maybe your own story will improve in the process.

Happy—or, at least, productive—holidays.

Copyright © Diane Lake

19Dec21

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