How Was Your Christmas?

It amazes me how so many people are uncomfortable with silence or are so given to shallow conversations that they cannot avoid making statements comparable to "How's the weather?", and somehow thinking that they are engaging in an exchange of sociable meaning. It may be viewed as a pleasantry or as being polite, but all I hear are broken records, lingual lemmings, so much so that it has evolved from being an annoyance to pure hilarity.

What I am speaking of are the holiday inquiries that visit us each year, almost as a mere replacement for the usual conversation fillers that are used the rest of the year (i.e., "How are you?", "What's up?", etc). The most prevalent examples of this most predictable behavior generally occur three times per year: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. By now, I am sure that you know what I am talking about. It happens in the break room at work, the lobby at church and the hallways at school. Like empty pinatas or loaves of white bread, they make our verbal exchanges malnutritious and make us comfortable as we masquerade our way through unenriched relationships and settle for the obvious surface of things.

"Are you ready for Thanksgiving?" "How was your Thanksgiving?" "Are you ready for Christmas?" "How was your Christmas?" "Are you ready for New Years?" "How was your New Years?"

Yes, there they are: the six questions that are asked each year and are just as likely to visit us as the fact that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening. As much as these questions drive me crazy, they are the type of questions that when asked, one almost has to respond with "How was yours?" You will never find me initiating these questions, but if you ask me one of them, I will most likely ask you how yours was, at the risk of being rude.

There are some, I will admit, that do actually mean that they really want to know how your holiday was, and they may throw in a little spice with the question, like "What are you doing for __________ (fill in the blank)?" And to you, the genuine few, I salute you.

I understand that many of us (including myself) use verbal pleasantries just to be polite. "Good morning. How are you today?" is something that you will find me saying most every day to certain people. It is like saying "Please" and "Thank you." Our culture has made it natural to utter such phrases at certain times in order to be considered civil and a person of etiquette. What kills me about the holiday questions is that they scream of predictability, yet it seems that most of the time people think they are being original or clever by inquiring as such.

If you are one of the millions of people that make me laugh by asking these questions each year, please understand that I do not mean to offend. In the words of George Costanza, "It's not you. It's me." This is just one of the many things in life that I cannot help but notice and if I were more normal, I would not pick society apart as I do.

Also, I implore you, do not stop. It would kill my article and would damper my spirits each holiday season. But if you would like to give the question some thought and would possibly like to go from the obvious surface to the meaningful depths of honesty and vulnerability, you may find that not only does the silence feel less uncomfortable, but your conversations will become more meaningful and the questions that you ask more original.