It’s just a doorway to a house. Over the years, one of many doorways to many houses. It beckons, as doorways do. But whatever the doorway in whichever the house, a marvelous thing happens when you step through it, if you’re lucky. The rest of the world melts away.
It’s a unique aspect of the holiday season. You gather and you celebrate, but it’s different from the other gatherings and celebrations during the rest of the year. There’s a peculiar warmth, one you can almost bathe in, one that swaddles you like a baby in a luxurious cloak of impenetrability.
It’s like some force field whose energy comes from the confluence of like-minded souls. Seeking serenity helps one find it, a task made easier when you’re not the only one searching.
Some years, you are more successful in the pursuit than others, for a range of reasons. It’s tempting to feel that it was easier to find that sweet spot in younger times. And maybe it was. Suffice to say that — again, if we’re lucky — we’ve found the vibe often enough to know that it’s real and to want to find it again and again, especially as life’s pressures grow ever more complicated.
These holiday gatherings of ours are part of something larger, a sort of year’s-end cleansing, this fortnight or so that allows us to shuck the part of the past year that made it lousy and embrace the new year that promises to be better. We humans need that kind of regeneration, on a regular basis.
And indeed, once upon a not-so-very-long-ago time, the turn of the calendar signified a brand new start. That’s still the case with our personal lives. We still have that sort of control, if we chose to embrace and exercise it. It’s entirely up to us. But for the world writ large, the turn of the calendar seems increasingly to be just the turn of the calendar.
The problems beyond our doorways are not so easily purged.
Perhaps that was always the case. Perhaps the idea that it used to be easier to put the world aside for longer periods of time was merely a trick of mind.
I’m not sure. Because it does seem that uncertainty hovers more palpably now, like one of those dark apparitions in the night skies of Harry Potter movies, looming over us from one year to the next.
There’s Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Hamas and religions and cultures at war and under threat, and it’s hard to see how any of it ends. It’s millions of the world’s people on the move from one inexorable force or another, and millions of others putting barriers before them, and not knowing how that can be resolved. It’s a climate we continue to heat and a sickness we continue to arm despite clear evidence that both approaches are crazy. It’s a pandemic that sits in the rearview mirror but haunts our forward vision, having shown us that our confidence that we have nothing to fear from nature is nothing more than gossamer. It’s a technology we’re not sure we can control, a democracy we’re not sure we can maintain, an economy we’re not sure is working, a discomfort with discussing ideas we’re not sure others will find palatable.
The only certainty is that we’re not certain of anything.
All of which only makes these holidays all the more important. A briefer respite is still a respite, and all the more to be treasured. If the peculiar warmth the holidays always have offered seems harder to find, all the more reason to seek it out.
I plan to step through several doorways this season. They beckon, as they always do. And I’m counting on being very lucky again.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
A doorway beckons, offering warmth
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24.12.2023
It’s just a doorway to a house. Over the years, one of many doorways to many houses. It beckons, as doorways do. But whatever the doorway in whichever the house, a marvelous thing happens when you step through it, if you’re lucky. The rest of the world melts away.
It’s a unique aspect of the holiday season. You gather and you celebrate, but it’s different from the other gatherings and celebrations during the rest of the year. There’s a peculiar warmth, one you can almost bathe in, one that swaddles you like a baby in a luxurious cloak of impenetrability.
It’s like some force field whose energy comes from the confluence of like-minded souls. Seeking serenity helps one find it, a task made easier when you’re not the only one searching.
Some years, you are more successful in the pursuit than others, for a range of reasons. It’s tempting to feel that it was easier to find that sweet spot in........
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