A Tumbleweed Christmas Story

As a kid growing up in Southern California, Christmas was always a time of joy! excitement! anticipation! … and confusion.

We went to magical Midnight Masses, but, meanwhile, at the mall, I wondered why Santa was sweating under all that red clothing. Christmas morning might bring a chilly frost but never any snow.

And in the early 1960s, at the arid fringes of L.A. County, where we lived, the most fashionable front lawn ornament was tumbleweeds, flocked and stacked high, à la Frosty the Prickly Snowman.

Little about yuletide made sense to me, because it didn’t deliver on the Madison Avenue, Northeast-centric image of the season. So, if my reality didn’t fit the myth, I’d shoehorn one into the other.

Lacking holly or much in the way of pine boughs, I fashioned Christmas wreaths out of IBM punch cards that I learned to fold, staple in concentric circles onto a paper plate, and then spray-paint gold. I finished off my conceptual wreaths by gluing glittery ornaments to the center.

And in my wholesale swallowing of TV-land reality, I didn’t care if my dad didn’t wear suits to work like Ward Cleaver — he was a dad! I bought him cufflinks as a Christmas gift one year. They went appreciated but unused.

Not having learned my lesson, or suspended my judgments of Dad’s worker status, I gave him a valet stand to hold the suit he never owned. He received it warmly and would gamely hang his work shirt and pants on it.

And so I learned early on how to deal with cognitive dissonance. I developed the art of making sense of things that didn’t match up to my reality by forcing reality to fit my perception, no matter the cost to myself or those I loved.

In this dyspeptic, gone a-kilter, post-pandemic world, it feels like a lot of us are resorting to my childhood coping mechanisms.

Take, for example, the economy. Surveys show that while many of us may think we’re individually doing well financially, on the macro level a majority believe the U.S. economy is in a very sorry state, and we’re blamin’ Biden.

The reality is a little more complicated.

Prices are high, but for most of us, our wage growth is outpacing inflation. The harsh truth is, prices won’t be coming down to prepandemic levels. And we really don’t want them to, because, according to some economists, the economy would slow down and we’d lose jobs.

The good news is: Things are changing for the better.

Look around. The stock market is soaring. People are shopping. Unemployment continues at record lows. Paychecks are up. Gas prices are falling. Inflation is coming under control enough for the Fed to not only not raise interest rates in this last round but for the central bank to indicate that it may be dropping rates three times in 2024. And, in breaking news, rents and mortgages are going down, too.

Indeed, it looks like we may be about to successfully carry out the impossible pirouette of spinning through a pandemic-distorted economy with enough control to land softly, instead of the widely expected thud into a recession.

But most of us aren’t feeling that macroeconomic love. We’re stuck in a COVID- (or Fox News-) induced trauma about bad financial news that won’t let us accept that Santa can come to a land where palm trees sway instead of pines. By insisting on believing our lying eyes, we are turning the sugar plums of good economic news into lumps of coal.

Similarly, we continue to walk in fear in a valley of darkness, where our perception of crime stalks us. The high-profile chaos of a few lurid retail snatch-and-grabs traumatized the nation. We weren’t imagining higher crime. Stats did go up immediately after opening up from COVID. But the data — that nasty word again — indicate that we’re emerging on the other side. The numbers on violent crime are trending downward for 2023.

That organized shoplifting that led to the closing of Walgreens and Target stores? Well, according to Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, “it never happened.” The National Retail Federation, which in April reported that such crime was “responsible for almost half of the store merchandise that vanished in 2021,” recently retracted its own statement, Krugman reports.

Greedy corporations also are responsible for our lingering fear of inflation. According to Forbes, galumphs like Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Kraft Heinz decided to ride on the coattails of the genuine causes of inflation, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the supply chain chaos. These and other companies just added on the costs, thinking we wouldn’t notice.

It’s called “greedflation” when corporations profiteer from inflation. As Forbes went on to observe, “Profits for companies in some of the world’s largest economies rose by 30 percent between 2019 and 2022, significantly outpacing inflation.”

Grinches.

Equally Grinchy is the way in which we allow our perceptions to murderously convert fiction into reality. Here I am thinking of a recent chilling report that the sinfully high rate of infant and maternal mortality among African Americans is attributable in part to the unconscious bias of physicians, even well-meaning ones.

I have seen this happen within my own family, where my presence in my legal drag and ivy swagger got a working-class, Afro-presenting Puerto Rican auntie of mine more accountability, and therefore better medical treatment, from her well-intentioned but linguistically frustrated surgeon.

In this era of fear and fakery, we must hold on to what’s core, we must push beyond our fears and preconceptions — subconscious and otherwise — to ferret out truths.

I’d like to think that being older, I’m wiser than that kid who thought anything other than a White Christmas was a fake. I am writing from Miami Beach, where, after decades of living out my fantasy of winter wonderlands in the Northeast, I’ll be reveling in a tropical Christmas, having just hosted a Hanukkah dinner. Thankfully, my mind can now recognize two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

I am now able to see beyond the Madison Avenue-imposed incongruities and hold fast to the true things I learned about Christmas as a child, like about the kid born in a manger who would go on to revolutionize the world with a message of love.

Love of the kind that wants to nurture that Black child in a womb to a healthy birth and beyond. Love of the kind that cherishes a mother endangered by an otherwise wanted pregnancy so that she doesn’t have to flee her state to seek appropriate medical help because the Creator also gave us the capacity to develop science and with it the ability to help her expand her family in the future. After all, child and Madonna are at the center of the Nativity scene.

I wish you a season of peace, prosperity, health — all blessed with truth.