On the First Day of Christmas...

Merry Christmas ya'all!

Even though everybody expects you to be happy around the holidays, those of us struggling with our mental health know that  it is not always that simple. But we are not the only ones, lots of folks get the Holiday Blues. It's okay. You are not an evil person because you cried on Christmas Day.

Maybe you miss your family because you could not afford to go visit them.

Maybe you lost your job recently and could not afford to buy your loved ones any gifts.

Maybe you work hard every day at a thankless job that does not pay well so you still could not afford to buy your loved ones gifts.

Maybe you just broke up with someone.

Maybe you are going through a divorce.

Maybe this time of year reminds you of a loved one who has passed away.

Maybe you don't even know why you are supposed to be happy during Christmas and you are depressed by the rabid displays of materialism, greed and hedonism that abounds this time of year. ("It's alright, Charlie Brown, I'll tell you what Christmas is all about.")

Maybe you are fighting depression, feel like a failure and are wondering if your life has any meaning. ("Get me back to my wife and kids! Help me Clarence, Please! I want to live again! I want to live again! I want to live again...Please, God...let me live again...")

Maybe somebody at school is bullying you and casting a shadow on your celebration. (In which case, don't make like Rudolph and just run away. Tell a Teacher, your parents, the School Counselor, your pastor, or your physical ed coach!)

You are all not alone, whichever the case may be. While gratitude is not the same thing as happiness and one does not follow automatically upon the other, it helps sometimes to start your day with three things that you are grateful for that happened in the last 24 hours. So for each of the 12 days of Christmas, I am going to share some of mine, in the hope that it will remind you of something that you can be glad about. ("Don't let's be gloomy! Let's play the 'glad game'!)

(singing) On the First Day of Christmas Baby Jesus Gave To Me...(hehe)

1. All the little children that I gave gifts to loved the small gifts of candy that I gave them! Yay! Gotta love unspoiled children!

2. A chance to go caroling for the elderly in my home town. I wanted to visit some people who might be lonely around Christmas or in pain. So I went with my choir from my parish and sang up and down the corridors and in the rooms in all the resting homes I knew about. You should have seen the smiles on their faces...it moved me to happy tears.

3. Lots of Ham, Turkey, Mashed Potatoes and Homemade Toffee!

Thank you Baby Jesus! Merry Christmas to All, God Bless you and go drink some Hot Cocoa with Peppermint Schnapps! Go eat some more turkey and ham! Go hug a relative you hardly know! Go kiss your  loved one under a mistletoe! Go have a caroling party! Go eat a sugar cookie! Go build a Gingerbread house! Or just curl up on the couch with a blanket, put on a pair of silly-looking fuzzy socks and watch the Christmas movies that warmed your heart when you were younger and wiser. Sending everyone in the whole world lots of love and wishing you all peace and joy this holy season.

On men who look real

I have always appreciated men. I appreciate their minds, strenghts, talents and ideals, when good. I have always been a visual person as well... passionate and intensely visual. This being said, it might come as something of a surprise to my paucity of readers that my romantic ideal, that made me swoon as a twelve-year old, was the Beast from the French fairy tale. I loved his humility and generosity and even his furry hugeness and stumblings of speed had an irresistable charm to me. When I was fifteen, my romantic ideal was Edmond Rostand's creation; Cyrano De Bergerac. I LOVED his chivarly, his rapier-sharp wit, his valor, his humor, his skill, his poetry, his honesty and his white plumb of freedom. Yes, I also loved his nose. My adoration of the character was so complete that when an unaware passerby, ignorant of the text, peered over my shoulder and said, "Who's the guy with the big, ugly nose?" I gasped and cried, "HIS NOSE IS BEAUTIFUL!" Indeed, most of my most beloved characters from books as well as the majority of my real life male friends are not what this current age would consider "classically handsome". It is a good thing that they are not, too! For the elder I grow, the more I am convinced, that what the fashion world presents for us as handsome, is something that very few men can or should achieve. I love men. I think they are marvelous to look at. They are fearfully and wonderfully crafter by God. But particularly when I visit my friends in California, I am accosted left and right from remarks by people appraising this man as "hot" and this man as "not" for the most silly reasons imaginable, mostly by women and sometimes even by the men themselves. When I point out a man as attractive, it is frequently rebutted by somebody who has grown too sophisticated to percieve anything as beautiful anymore. Not even the human eye, which is more wondrous than the ocean, or the human hand, so expressive and so marvellously designed. So I ask the person, "Well, what does a man have to look like in order to be deemed attractive?" There are many possible responses but I will name a few of the replies. "I wish I couls marry a man who looks like Brad Pitt." "Orlando Bloom" "Robert Pattinson" "Taylor Lautner" "Johnny Depp" "George Clooney" "Robert Downey Jr." "Joe Jonas". It makes me sad to encounter attitudes like that because I love men who look real. I do not want to marry a man who looks like any of those people (because what the blazes would a person like that have to do with me? What would somebody that toned, starved, painted, airbrushed, body-doubled, digitally edited and universally admired see in a beauty as humble and genuine as mine? Besides, he would cheat!) They don't look real because they are not. I like men who look real. Real men wear glasses. Real men are not often toned and built up. Real men often wear ugly and ill-matched clothes. Real men have receding hairlines. Real men are more "rotund". Real men are "scrawny". real men are short. Real men have dry patches of skin, blemishes, unshaved faces, scars, broken noses, uneven features, graying hair, or thin hair, wrinkles around their foreheads. Real men do not wear designer clothing. Real men do not drive a ferrari. Real men do not have the incomes to afford your prada bags, gucci shoes and plastic surgeries. Real men are Beautiful. They are all beautiful. Their hands are strong and manly from their work and generous deeds. Their eyes glisten with a vision to see what is just and desire it. Their mouths are beautiful from speaking the truth. Their ears are glorious because they listen and hear.