I enjoyed reading Kelley Heckart’s article published on this blog on Saturday. Christmas is not always a happy time of the year. However, everyone seems intent on keeping up the myth of family closeness, warmth and cheer. Some years ago, I was a volunteer on a suicide telephone line, and the weeks around Christmas we were certainly needed. In my upcoming release, Words for Patty Jo, one of my main characters, David, expresses what his feelings are about Christmas cheer.
The repetitious jangling Yuletide ditties exasperate him; he is disheartened by the sight of wretched, unemployed older men who, disguised in long white beards and jaunty red costumes, dispense false joy to tots. Cheer isn’t what you see in their eyes, or in the faces of frantic buyers, or women confronted by a mountain of cleaning and cooking, or those negotiating sad marriages and unpleasant families.
To help others cope with the dangerous holiday jollity, he mans the telephone line at the local suicide prevention group, listens to the abandoned, the widowed, the divorced, the desperate, the ill, the forgotten, the lonely elderly. Victims of this noisy commercial fakery, they have been duped into believing they are inferior, that they haven’t made the grade, climbed the right ladder, chosen the winning card.
Words for Patty Jo
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