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Weird World of Deborama — Getting Dark and Philosophical About the Holidays
The title of this article is meant to gently lead you into a dark place. If I had titled it “Dying During the Holidays” you probably would have skipped it, right? Sorry about that. But now that you’re here, let me explain.
If you’re one of my constant readers or friends, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I was a deeply weird kid. It’s considered cute nowadays, but it wasn’t at all cute in the 1950s. One of the ways I was weird was that I thought about death a lot. And not because I had much experience with it, it just arose from somewhere deep in my childish soul, usually when I was supposed to be falling asleep at night.
One of the many things I brought myself to tears about (along with thoughts of lambs to the slaughter, or how some kids lost their mothers while they were still kids) I worried about people dying right before or in the middle of an anticipated celebration, like Christmas. Because even as a very little one, I realized people were dying all the time, so some of them had to die on Christmas! (Also as a white Christian American child with very conservative parents, I thought the entire world celebrated Christmas.)
It turns out that some social scientists pondered this too, but from a public health perspective rather than from an insomniac…
