Ah, Thanksgiving again, the portal to the madness and melancholy of the holiday season, the signpost warning that another year’s end is coming up fast and you’re going too fast to make the turn.

As you may have surmised, I have a difficult time with the holiday season. I usually start feeling anxious and depressive just after Halloween, and it only gets worse until New Year’s Day is safely past.

I have my reasons, both ancient and modern. A lot of my emotions about this time of the year are rooted in childhood memories of holiday gatherings that bore little resemblance to the idealized Norman Rockwell vision up there at the top, and were instead better described by a phrase my buddy Jack came up with: “family hostage situations.” It’s not that my people were fighting all the time, or that an alcoholic uncle was overturning tables while hitting on my mom, or anything outrageous like that. But the holidays for my clan were nevertheless tainted by smaller, and in some ways far more devastating, incidents. There was a lot of emotional manipulation involved, so the prevailing mood on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day was almost always a bilious mixture of guilt, resentment, and obligation, never the joy that so many other families seem to feel, or at least that the media tells us we’re supposed to feel. I may have been only a child, and not directly affected myself by what was happening, but I was an unusually observant kid, and I saw what the holidays did to both of my parents. And I didn’t like it.

In time, the situation evolved, and the gathering of the extended family eventually ceased for various reasons. You’d think that would’ve put an end to the discomfort, but in fact, it merely introduced a whole new problem, namely that my immediate family — my parents and I — had no traditions of our own to fall back on, nothing that was just between the three of us. We’d never established any, because everything had been about those big, insufferable gatherings. And even now, years later, we’ve been unable to come up with anything. The three of us spend the holidays fumbling around some vague notion of what we think we ought to be doing, but without much heart for doing it, and never much sense of fulfillment. It doesn’t help that my father remains as grinchy as ever, even though the proximal source of his holiday stress — the obligation to spend the day with people he didn’t want to be with — is long past. But I guess some conditioned responses are simply ingrained too deeply to break. So while the Bennion holidays are no longer colored by the nasty feelings that used to surround them, they’re still awkward and tense.

As if all that baggage wasn’t enough, I have added a layer of my own regrets (which I will keep to myself, thank you very much), as well as my intellectual objections to all the stupid cultural stuff that comes around this time of year: the undignified insanity of Black Friday; the decorating arms-race in which the neighbors try to out-do each other for gaudiest, most power-consuming lawn displays; the out-of control consumerism, and the retail-based economy which depends on it; and the performance anxiety of having to find the right gift for everyone, and find the time to visit everyone who wants to see you, and to send out cards and decorate the house and cook and bake all those special, once-a-year dishes, and of course to be hap-hap-happy while you do all this stuff, because if you’re not, everyone will wonder what’s wrong with you…

In short, the last six weeks of the year just aren’t any damn fun. Maybe it would be different if I had kids, or at least somebody’s kids, around, because I have it on pretty good authority that this changes the holiday dynamic pretty drastically. But I don’t. And The Girlfriend and I agreed long ago that she spends the holidays with her family and I spend them with mine, so the dynamic here comprises only a grumpy middle-aged man and two people fast approaching old, none of whom have any clue of how to be genuinely happy on Thanksgiving or Christmas. That Norman Rockwell painting is a cruel taunt, as far as I’m concerned. Pure fantasy, as far-fetched in its way as Star Wars. (Actually, if I had to tell you which universe feels more authentic to me, three guesses what my answer would be…)

For a few years in my teens, my father kept suggesting that we just forget about Christmas and spend the money to go to Hawaii instead. I remember getting so pissed at him when he said that, like he was a monster for not even wanting to try and be “normal.” These days, however, I’m thinking a black-sand beach and a drink with an umbrella in it might be a pretty nice alternative to all this angst…