Once the Christmas season is in the air, and people are rushing from store to store, planning their feasts, picking out their gifts, and running up their credit cards, there is something I like to do. It involves dive bars (which, to be honest, also play a big part in the rest of my year), diners, universal jukeboxes, and what my friend Rich who I used to work in a record store with calls “jukebox terrorism.” It starts off innocuously enough. I play “Blue Christmas” by Elvis Presley. A lot of people know this one, and a lot of people are relieved by a good Christmas song that stands in stark contrast to the buy-more buy-now jingle-bells Christmas-cheer songs they’ve been inundated with every time they walk into a store. Maybe if it ended there, the guys at the end of the bar with their long white beards and the aging diner servers might be happy with it. But it doesn’t end there.
Sometimes, to throw people off, my next song will be “King of Carrot Flowers Part 2” by Neutral Milk Hotel. Not technically a Christmas song! And you can see everyone wondering who the heck this guy with the terrible voice wailing, “I love you, Jesus Chri-iiiiiii-ist!” is. This is when people begin to look at each other with discomfort, but that’s all in a day’s work with jukebox terrorism. (There is another version of this game called karaoke terrorism, but I’ll not go into that so much here. This is about Christmas music.)
After everyone is baffled by this song, I’ll do a one-two punch of “Christmas Cards from a Hooker in Minneapolis” by Tom Waits and “Christmas in Prison” by John Prine. These gruff-voiced barroom poets are a little more the musical speed of the diners and dive bars, but I will always stop and point out some of the sadder lines to anyone who will listen. “I wish I had back all the money we spent on dope. I’d buy a used car lot, and never sell any of them, just drive a different car every day of the week, depending how I feel.”
I don’t know why I find this particular game fun. I think it’s almost gotten me killed in some of the seedier, smaller town bars that weren’t thrilled with my trans ass on the barstool to begin with. But I do it every year. And I have for years now.
The fact is, the holidays have made me miserable for a long, long time. Around eight years now, since my brother threatened to kill me for being trans over a Christmas break from college and I gave up on having a blood family. Since my wife left abruptly and moved across the country for a new relationship. Since I moved far away from the city I’d been in for 16 years and into the Rust Belt. I have friends, I have chosen family, I have places to go — but the holidays make me sad anyway. There is so much pressure for the food to be great, the company to be wonderful, the memories to be perfect. I’d rather sit in a bar where everyone thinks I’m crazy.
While the holiday edition of jukebox terrorism has always given me a laugh, it’s never really relieved the misery of the holidays for me. Sure, I may die on the hill of “Christmas Cards from a Hooker in Minneapolis” in a dive bar one day (literally!), but come the actual holiday, I still feel this weird pressure to be somewhere, to do something, to have some experience that just isn’t open to me. And even when it is in a sense, it’ll never be enough to make all the things that hurt about the holidays disappear. Friendsgiving doesn’t ever make me not want to call a mother who I can’t call anymore. Christmas with my closest friends’ families doesn’t change my brother’s death threats to me.
This year, though, something shifted. Birthdays have long been as fraught for me as holidays, and I never know how to celebrate mine. Then I realized I had the same birth week as three of my depressing music heroes, and what I’d really love to do would be get myself a cheap motel, a decent bottle of wine, and write sad things for days. It sounded like heaven, honestly. Once this shifted in my head, I wondered if I could apply it to other parts of my life, other days that had huge expectations from both ourselves and others for celebration. What if I spent Thanksgiving taking a break, napping, drinking mimosas, reading a book of poems about Hank Williams, snuggling my cat, and writing? It wasn’t what I was supposed to do, for sure, but it sounded a lot closer to my ideal of what I wanted once I took away all the holiday expectations.
This holiday season, I’m going to Centralia, a haunted, burning ghost town near my hometown to do some research for a novel I’m writing. I’m so excited for a holiday that feels like what I like and want, not what’s expected of me.
Come to think of it, I haven’t terrorized any bars or diners with depressing holiday music yet this year, either.
Yet.
