c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED-The psychiatrist who lives in my apartment building tells me the long holiday season, which begins at Thanksgiving and extends until after New Year’s Day, is his busiest time of the year.

His office is filled with anxiety-ridden patients, half of whom dread being without their families during”the holidays,”and the half dreads being with their families.”Either way, they are unhappy,”chortles my neighbor.

The chaplains who were on-duty at Chicago’s O’Hare airport during the recent Christmas/Hanukkah travel rush say the same thing. The many passengers who flocked to the airport chapels before boarding their flights were not worried about aircraft safety. Rather, they prayed for strength to successfully deal with their family members, especially parents, at the festive tables awaiting them.

No wonder the O’Hare travelers prayed in such large numbers. Looming ahead for them, like the Titanic’s iceberg, were unresolved sibling rivalries, the infantilization all grown children feel when entering the parental home, family recriminations left festering for years, and inane conversations frequently focusing on the size of the Hanukkah candles, the weather, and the weight of a holiday turkey.

Americans, whatever our particular religious beliefs, are annually saturated with an idealized image of what our lives should be like. Norman Rockwell paintings of snowflakes, toasty family gatherings around crackling fireplaces, and cherubic-like children opening holiday gifts amidst beaming relatives have been programmed into us for decades. But when the reality is more like a depressing William Hogarth painting than a Rockwellian Eden, terrible feelings of rage and anger often erupt.

Mental health professionals know suicides dramatically increase during the holiday season of forced gaiety and coerced good cheer. This year, the wire services reported a woman jumped to her death from a moving car following”an acrimonious Thanksgiving dinner.”When I shared this sad item with some clergy colleagues, it evoked painful sighs, not merely of sympathy, but of immediate recognition of the intense emotions involved.

In addition to the unrelenting pressure for utopian family love and reconciliation, Americans were constantly urged to buy, buy, buy during the season lest the world economy collapse because of decreased consumer sales. TV cameras followed bargain-hunting customers to the omnipresent shopping malls in search of stories. Were we buying enough to keep the factories, usually located in Hong Kong and China, humming? Wall Street analysts pored over daily retail sales statistics in search of trends, and merchants confidently expected to realize large profits during the holiday season.

But for the third straight year, holiday sales were”lackluster”or worse. Shoppers no longer rushed to buy as they had done in the past. Yet, this sobering news came against a backdrop of low inflation, high employment, and fatter salaries. It seems millions of Americans were finally looking past the hype and holiday glitz, and were sending a clear signal that the times they are a-changin’.

There are reports a growing number of synagogue and church members have voluntarily placed spending caps on their gifts. Money that once went to sweaters and ties now goes to carefully selected charities. These same groups of Jews and Christians are-gasp!-re-emphasizing the classical meanings of Hanukkah and Christmas. But something else is at work as well.

More and more of us are living alone, far from the traditional-sometimes neurotic-pull of our relatives. And when, during the holiday season, we are temporarily thrown into the bubbling cauldron called the extended family, many of us react in pathological ways.

And as our religious practices and identities become increasingly individualistic, even idiosyncratic in nature, a giant dysfunctional gap emerges between what our family relationships are and what the popular culture tells us they should be.

But even as smoking cigarettes and burning our skins under a blistering sun is now correctly perceived as being highly dangerous to our health, perhaps, just perhaps, the frenetic, anxiety-producing excesses of”the holidays”will soon be seen in the same way. I hope so.

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