COMING DOWN FROM THE CHRISTMAS CRACK PIPE? WELCOME TO THE ~DARK IN-BETWEEN~
The listless chasm between Christmas and New Year
I’ve said it before—I’ll say it again: we’ve officially entered the dark in between™—that muted, listless week that lives in the chasm between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.
(*Prefer to listen? I got you! Click below, narrated by me, not creepy AI).
It’s a weird week. Brash and bleak simultaneously. A sock in the face with an indifferent fist.
The holiday season—which in Zara City™ begins the eve of Thanksgiving and culminates at midnight 12/25—is the *opposite* of the dark in-between—which begins mid-morning 12/26, culminating around sunset of New Year’s Eve, a few hours before the ~parties~ start.
It’s a cultural lie that the holiday season is most beloved by white-picket fence families. The holidays are far too high-pressure for them to enjoy—too many photos to pose for; it’s like a grueling catalog modeling gig, unpaid.
But for those of us who perhaps live in *apartments* in *gory* cities and are struggling to figure out what to do next, perhaps are bored in love and work, suffering from generalized ennui—the holidays are welcomed, low-pressure reprieve from the banality of daily life.
The holidays are like truffle oil. Douse the blandest diet cracker in truffle oil—and suddenly it’s luxurious! Gourmand!
And for those of us who are grieving unspeakable loss, are freshly heartbroken, have been heartbroken for a decade and then some, are depressed, feeling too many heavy feelings all at once, sick and tired of being sick and tired—the holiday season is a holy time of year. (Even if the majority of this demographic is either Jewish or too precocious to subscribe to organized religion or both, like moi).
Firstly, for us sad as fuckers, the holidays are about as low presh as it gets. When you’re going through real-life shit—you don’t get bent out of shape about taking perfect family portraits and the “what will the neighbors think” rigamarole doesn’t even cross your mind. Your life is in shambles—who cares?
Additionally, there are so many accessible ways for us to self-medicate the pain and silence the demons this time of year! It’s far easier to ignore the thoughts of pending doom when you’re hopped up on glittery ornaments and shiny wrapping paper.
Feeling blue, baby? Take a stroll through your local department store and cop a hit off the Christmas dopamine crack pipe! It’ll tide you over for days. SSRI girls get it. We’ll show you how to numb out on some Christmas cookies, trust.
Look. No matter how badly the life blow-up was this year—at the end of the day, I think we can all agree that drudging that heavy Christmas tree into the living room was a workout. You broke a sweat, certainly. And you know what I *love* about manual labor, sweat, and all that? The flood of endorphins. Makes the Prozac work even better.
This year was the first year I decorated my mother’s house, no help or input from the Matriarch Lynn.
Mum’s got gazillions of chic, acrylic ornaments and avante guard Christmas decor. There’s an entire tree dedicated to Frida Kahlo and birds. (Yes, birds and Frida). She spends days standing on ladders in silk knee-grazing negligées expertly arranging antique angels, rhinestone elephants, and gold leaves onto the creamy stone ledges of her living room. The result is something out of Architectural Digest.
But this year, she was too sick from chemo to do all that labor. She couldn’t even get out of bed.
“Mum,” I asked, nervously, bracing myself for rejection as she’s very controlling about the aesthetic of well, everything in her orbit.
“What?” she said flatly, laying in her four-poster bed, bald and beautiful—you can take the model out of the modeling world, but you can NEVER take the model out of the girl—not even two days post-chemotherapy.
“Can I be in charge of the Christmas decorating?” I squeaked. Like I said, I was in deep grief and jonesing for some of that holiday heroin.
PAUSE. HEART-THUMP. HEART-THUMP. PAUSE. HEART-THUMP. HEART-THUMP. PAUSE.
“Fine,” she finally answered.
“I’ll make you proud,” I promised.
I put on the brand new trauma sweater I bought *especially* for the holidays—a baby pink oversized knit that falls to the knees with a demented gingerbread cookie graphic emblazoned on the front. I rolled up those sleeves and got to werque. (Watch reel detailing the whole thing here).
Ruba and Eduardo helped me put up the tree—thank Lana Del Rey—that bitch was heartier than I remembered.
By the time we managed to get her up and running, it was time for all of us to go to dinner with my dad—and if there’s one thing rule we all follow in this house it’s this: you must *never* be late to dinner with Richie, the father.
Despite the two martinis and glass of wine, I’d merrily medicated with at dinner—the next morning I shot out of bed at 6 a.m. bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I tossed my pink trauma sweater over my pajamas, ready to decorate like a boss.
For eight hours I balanced ornaments on the grand living room tree—
—adorned the Frida Kahlo tree on the veranda with her dutiful birds—
—and decorated a third tree: a pink tree with a “toxic femininity” theme, my brain-child, of course.
Did I rollercoaster through a mash-up of emotions as I stood on ladders expertly arranging figurines on the creamy ledges of my mother’s living room?
Of course.
I came across a box of my brother’s old tennis trophies and wept.
I found the microscopic ballet slippers from when I was a preemie and suddenly longed for vastly different times. The days when my brother and I were kids and convinced ourselves we heard reindeer hooves on our roof on Christmas Eve; my parents coming home from a glam dinner buzzed and stylish; tucking us in, validating that the hoof sound was real, mum purring “I believe in anything magic,” smelling of Dior Poison and Terry Mugler; garlic and champagne. I was misty-eyed for hours, yes, but I was able to move through the grief more seamlessly with so many pretty things to look at, to touch, to decorate.
Those glittery little balls you put on Christmas trees give both yoga and pharmacology a real run for her money.
Of course, nuanced feelings about family and childhood, money and death and should I have a child of my own? creep in for all of us during the holiday season—but don’t those emotions surface in the blandest of times, too?
I’d rather think about death in a pretty environment than a bleak one.
Plus, it’s much easier to anesthetize the trauma dramas of the past when “jingle bells” is playing softly in the background. And it’s socially acceptable to be on a white wine drip for two weeks straight, which helps temporarily. Band-Aid style.
In fact, Christmas is like slapping a shiny silver band-aid over the tumor.
It’s like developing a *minor* coke problem so *temporary* that it skips right past the life-wrecking consequences—you just get to experience the euphoric upswing without having to sit in a plastic rehab chair reckoning with the irrevocable fact that you sold precious family heirlooms for crack.
And then we get to give into all the ~trashy pleasures~ we normally pretend to be too sophisticated to enjoy. I’ve seen the most diehard music snobs hum along to Christmas tunes, most of which, not to be a Scrooge—but you know I’m right—are objectively bad.
But it’s such a relief to like the bad thing for once, you know?
It’s such a relief to give into mediocrity.
There’s no coercion to be cool or edgy or brilliant or witty or stylish or unique in the season of shimmer glimmer. Basic-bitchness is not just encouraged but celebrated in every demographic during the holidays. I heard Gwen Stefani covered “Santa Baby” this year—which I haven’t heard and really don’t want to—but if Gwen is allowed to basic—so can you. So can I. On Christmas—that is.
And then the wicked witch of the 26th bounds into our bedrooms, unannounced and interrupting our REM sleep. She drags us into the bathroom and forces us to take in our weathered reflections. Suddenly, it’s like we’ve lost the boning in our faces, we’re marshmallow heads. The whites of our eyes have turned soviet red. A wave of chemical sadness crashes over us. All that drinking and glitter and pretending the bad Christmas music was good—it might’ve worked in the short-term—but as my flamingly homosexual Irish alcoholic friend wisely told me after a bender in my twenties, “what comes up must come down, me dear.”
And babe—isn’t that the fucking truth in the dark-in-between! Yesterday we were floating like a snowflake—today we’re tasting the floorboards imagining what it would be like to not exist.
The 26th, a woman, who I imagine to be the kind of self-righteous, non-drinker-not-because-she’s-an-alcholic-with-a-past-but-because-she’s-simply-not-interested, who drives a MILF-y SUV and owns a Pure Barre studio in Boca. She’s the cold judgmental gaze that hisses, “You smell like carbs." She’ll swing her SUV keys around her manicured nails. They’ll jingle but not in a jingle bells kind of way—in a Republican kind of way. She’ll trot out the door, her golden goose sneakers quietly padding down the hall, leaving you to stew in your shame.
I’ll just go to another Christmas party and forget all about how shitty I feel! We’ll remind ourselves.
And then we remember Christmas is over.
There are no more parties.
That’s fine I’ll just lose myself in work.
And then we remember that we’re off till January 5th.
Or that we’ve been laid off.
Or that yes, we still hate our jobs.
And yes we *could* take this time to start brainstorming our next podcast idea or whatnot—but we could also take this time to rot away on the couch for a few days.
Or we could take this time to manifest and cleanse and journal—but also what’s the point?
The New Year is coming, and the New Year is more exciting to the emotionally fragile than the rapture is to Christians.
Because, as we melt into the couch and stick our swollen fingers in the chip bag for the fourteen-hundredth time, we remind ourselves that this New Year is going to be OUR YEAR.
In the New Year, you’ve got goals, don’t you? You’re going to get influencer-level healthy, didn’t you tell me? I BELIEVE IN YOU. So why not give yourself ~one week more~ of sinning? Because let me tell you—there’ll be NO sinning in the New Year. So the Dark In-Between is your last shot to sin.
So fuck it. Let yourself sink in the darkness.
Because in the new year, you’ll be so busy becoming a certified yoga instructor manifesting money cold plunges ice baths journals breath work starting a small business finally getting your real estate licenses—there won’t be time for SALACIOUS DARK DEBAUCHERY.
Get down and dirty with the grime while there’s still time, little sister.
‘Cause in the New Year, there’ll be no grime. Lean into the dark while can you.
For the lights are about to turn the fuck on and there’s a certain fabulous hedonism that can only survive in the darkness.
Suck your champagne out of a straw and cry yourself to sleep because we’ve only got a few days left of weeping to reality TV blackout drunk.
You’ll definitely be able to find me shooting up hot spiked chocolate, nodding out to housewives contemplating what it would be like to not exist, for the next several days.
BUT in the NEW YEAR—I swear to Lana—I’ll be shinier than the shiniest Christmas ornament—glitter fucking wishes.
XOXO,
Zara Your Lesbian Big Sis