Head Tale

It’s been a tough end to the year.

There are some fairly major changes happening at work that will affect myself and numerous other supervisors in the new year.  One of those supervisors, a friend and mentor, died unexpectedly at the start of December – quite young but also getting very close to retirement, having been a “library lifer”.  There’s some other stuff happening in my personal life that I know will end up being happy but right now is stressful and uncertain.

Oh, and we’re in a never-ending worldwide pandemic where the fast-spreading Omicron variant seems to be racing to spread as widely as possible, even as we all countdown the days to Christmas.

Christmas is usually one of my favourite holidays of the year.  But this year has just felt heavy and blue.

Which somehow got me thinking of the first time I heard of “Blue Christmas” (in the church context as opposed to the Elvis context) a few years ago from an Anglican priest I know.

He was delivering a Blue Christmas service in the lead-up to Christmas and explained to me how it was a way his church tried to reach people who didn’t find Christmas joyous because they were grieving or had bad memories of Christmas or whatever.

I remember thinking “That’s a great idea.  So nice religious people have that available.”

Then I carried on with my life.

But then this past weekend, even though I’m a pretty outspoken atheist but feeling particularly down, I found myself searching for “Blue Christmas Service” on YouTube.

There were a number of videos I dipped into and though none of them were enough to make me feel like I had to race out to rejoin the United Church of my youth, they did touch me a way I didn’t expect.

What a strange fucking year! 🙁