Holiday depression, cynicism and support networks.

December 28, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Conventional wisdom has long repeated that suicides are higher around the holidays. Apparently, we’ve always believed, some people become hopelessly depressed at a time of year when everybody else is enjoying festivities and making merry. Imagine how you feel when you are left out of something which everybody else is part of. It is easy to get depressed.

Well, actually I first read this in the LA Times December 22, but confirmed it at Snopes.com’s urban legends department: the suicide spike is not true. The Centre for Suicide Prevention in Canada says the same thing, and notes that suicides actually drop right around the holidays. The reason?

• The gathering of friends and relatives surround and protect vulnerable people;
• Christmas celebrations may evoke positive memories, hopefulness, and a renewed outlook for those in distress.
• Community resources: there is an increased awareness of community resources and safety-nets available during the holidays, including food banks, shelters and outreach programs.

Those factors of course reconfirm for me the vital importance of caring people continuing to care for others – to extend the good will of Christmas to the population which may not be regular “churchy people.” If the selflessness of the holiday gift-giving has any real benefit, it can remind us that our generosity makes a difference. (The tough part is that our generosity has to be generosity of spirit, not generosity of stuff. When we give our own hearts to people, we ease the depression, stress and pain which others may be experiencing.)

There is no mistaking that the Christmas holiday season adds more stress to people’s lives. Then on top of that, employers often wait to the end of the year to lay off or downsize. Losing your job in December can be a serious bummer. The worst holiday stress, I think, is financial. We all tend to over-extend our financial resources: run the credit cards up, spend all the cash, buy things which promise us “no payments ‘til February 2009!” etc.

Today we remember the “Holy Innocents, Martyrs”, the infant boys of Bethlehem who were slaughtered by King Herod in his attempt to exterminate the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:13–23). A woman called my office the week before Christmas and said that she didn’t have a Christmas tree for her children. She was wondering if I could help her out. I think I may have seemed a little “short” with her. I said something like, “We are a church, not a Christmas tree lot.” In truth (I told her) we have food for the hungry, and I could help her out with groceries, but we do not have the resources to make everybody’s Christmas merry and bright–especially financially.

Over the years I have been asked to pay someone’s natural gas or electric bill, pay their rent, etc. What I really wanted to say is, “We are a church, not an ATM machine.” Yes, some of these are definite scams, because they will tell me complicated stories that can only be solved with cash. In one case, I offered to come to the manager’s office and give the manager some rent money, but the needy person on the phone simply hung up on me when I didn’t offer to drive to the motel in which he was living, 25 miles away, to give him cash.

If cynicism is a form of spiritual suicide, maybe the rate does go up in December!

Christmas can remind us not only to be generous, as individuals, but also to lower our expectations. As it turned out, the Delancy Street Christmas tree lot in our neighborhood was giving away Christmas trees by December 23. I had suggested to this mother over the phone that she check with the tree lots; I wonder if she did. The expectation she needed to lower is that, if she does not have the resources, someone should give them to her so she can have everything she desires just like everybody else. With patience, however, she could do what our grandparents’ generation did: put up a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. One year when we didn’t have a lot of money, we got a tree out of the dumpster on Christmas Eve. It was very pretty when it was decorated.

I have lowered my expectations, too, that people will be as generous as I wish they would be. And even I have my limits. My church is asked for far more financial assistance than we could ever provide. Too often I have given help out of my own wallet, which makes me less and less generous over time. If the churches were full (as we think we remember of earlier generations—is that another urban myth that needs debunking?), and the needy were less needy, perhaps there would be more resources to distribute. But now I realize if the churches are just faithful, it will be enough, if that faithfulness is really a generosity of spirit, not of stuff. Where Christmas consumerism traps us is in supposing that we should concentrate on money, spending, and providing a material Christmas for the needy. My heart goes out to those whose expectations are tied to that. Hopefully, as all resources become more scarce, our society can re-think what consumerism has done to us, and has robbed from our spirits.

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