The calendar year has changed and life keeps galloping by. The “holidays” are over again, and many of us are carrying them around on our bellies, waists and/or butts. I have a confession to make. I’ve never liked Christmas cookies. Occasionally there is one that is appealing, but for me, mostly they taste like sweet cardboard, with the exception of Mexican wedding cookies, those sumptuous round balls coated with powdered sugar. And what’s a wedding cookie got to do with Christmas? Getting married on Christmas would be a drag. Imagine wedding gifts wrapped in green, with little Santas and candy canes all over the paper. I have a good friend whose mom turned 100 years old on Christmas day. Maybe she has stayed alive that long so that her birthday would finally trump “the holidays.”
I have a wish to write a song called, “Holiday Blubber,” or “Christmas Blubber.” I have a few lines in my head, such as, “Holiday blubber hugs me ’round the waist: loiters on my backside, greets me in my face.” Obviously, this tune isn’t ready for air time yet. Overeating can, of course, start with Christmas, but then I thought of the unbridled gluttony of Thanksgiving, and how this frame of mind can stretch out for about six weeks, until the new year beckons privileged Americans back to culinary sanity. We are unbelievably lucky that this is a problem. This is an obvious reference to the parts of the world that are less lucky, and never have had an opportunity to consider the advisability of eating less.
Addiction takes so many forms. It’s more than just what we put in our bodies: e.g. food, drugs, alcohol, nicotine. We can also be addicted to behaviors. (An aside: I do get sick of the tag line “oholic” being added to any old word. Foodoholic. Dogoholic. Spendoholic. Whateveroholic. For this new year, I am resolved to change addictive behavior patterns of my own that I’m not happy with. Some of the patterns live in my head, and generally are not acted out, but they make me uncomfortable. I now have more awareness of “ego”, and how that can lift me too high and drop me too low. I want to put aside the mentality of “better than or worse than”, which serves no one. When playing music, that attitude is a real drag. It takes me away from the spirit of the music itself, and is like carrying a 50 pound backpack. Are thought patterns truly addiction? Maybe it’s not fair to call ingrained emotional habits addictions. They are, rather, default internal stances that we develop in childhood to cope with the families and the culture in which we live. But letting them hang on, like holiday blubber, just weighs us down.
When I was about 18, I learned a song that is from the Middle Ages, or maybe the Renaissance. (Despite college and graduate school, I never can stay clear about history. I just don’t seem to care about dates.) The song is called, “Tobacco, Tobacco.” The topic is unconflicted addiction to tobacco, and the song joyfully proclaims that tobacco is like love. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, people had no idea that tobacco could kill you. Hmm. We didn’t know that in the mid-20th century either.
Tobacco, Tobacco
Susan Rose: Singing Grandma 