I have been having some trouble this year – as I did the year before, and the year before that – getting into the holiday spirit. This didn’t used to be particularly hard for me to do. Though not my favorite holiday (it’s pretty much always been Halloween, even when I was little), I’ve always (or perhaps I should say at least until recently) really loved the holiday. This despite my complete lack of religious belief and general annoyance with the crass commercialization of something that I love for the Rockwell-like ideas of hot apple cider and family and gathering around the tree. My childhood was at times amazingly like that Rockwellian fantasy. My adult life to this point, sadly is not.

When I was younger I had a tradition that I observed every Thanksgiving night that began my happy embrace of the season. Sometime after all the family had gone home and I was as full of apple pie and cranberry sauce as it is possible to be, I would go to my room and listen to a very particular song on a very particular holiday CD. (The actual artist and CD are too embarrassing to reveal here, and that must be truly embarrassing when you consider that just a few posts below this one I gush all over how much I enjoy that “Unwritten” song.) That tradition has in recent years fallen by the wayside. This year it didn’t even occur to me until sometime last week that I hadn’t listened to the song – and even though I’ve finally broken down and put holiday music on my iPod, I still haven’t heard that song.

Part of this, almost certainly, is that I have not yet (and may never truly) adjust to the reality of winter in Phoenix (read: there isn’t such a thing). I all but missed Halloween what with the 100-degree temperatures and on Thanksgiving I was uncomfortably hot sitting outside. Even the recent “cold”-er weather hasn’t really helped. I’m not going to extol the virtues of a white Christmas or anything – snow is only pretty in theory, in reality it is wet and cold and makes traveling a distinct pain in the ass. But it does at least set the right mood.

More of the problem, though, is just that I’ve become an adult and being an adult sucks. Sucks hard. I mean, OK, sex is pretty good and I enjoy my booze every now and then and driving is nice, but besides all that adulthood is pretty much a bust. Work? Sucks. Money? Don’t have enough. Bills? Don’t get me started. And even Christmas. It’s just not fun anymore.

The worst of it is that Christmas reminds me not only of the basic things you lose as you grow from a child into an adult, but it reminds me in particular of a part of me that I’ve lost and that I miss. It might seem hard to believe, those of you who have never known me as anything but the decidedly cynical bastard I am, but as recently as high school I was terribly romantic, hopelessly romantic. Not in the Valentine way (I’m still reasonably good at all that), but in the classical way. I believed in the goodness of the world and the power of love to overcome everything and in beauty and in soulmates and … basically all the shit that I today roll my eyes at and regard as utter bullshit.

But, like most cynics who deride the more wide-eyed among us, I really only do so out of jealousy: I miss being that way. Even as I openly gag and push away any such silly, starry-eyed idealism, part of me still yearns for it, part of me remembers when I believed in it, and that part of me misses being that way. It’s a much more fulfilling way to live.

Take the movie to which I increasingly make an effort to relate every thing in the world to – Love Actually. It’s not just a romantic comedy. It’s like ten. It’s sickeningly bursting with optimism and joy and the belief that amor omnia vincit and “all you need is love” and while it gets to me on all those levels (I’m still not that jaded, apparently) the stories I find myself liking best are the dark ones – the long-time wife who knows her husband is cheating but doesn’t know exactly in what manner, and the new wife who suddenly realizes that her husband’s best friend is in love with her. These plot lines have the ring of dark reality to them, and of course like any realist I’m far more enamored with dark real stories than happy real ones (my happy marriage is not nearly as interesting to write about as a marriage falling apart would be, for example). This is disturbing, and while this is itself a sign of hope, I just know that it wasn’t so long ago when I would have seen myself in Colin Firth’s writer character and hated the two stories that dared to bring darkness into such a bright movie. I still love Firth’s story, and Hugh Grant’s, and etc., but they don’t interest me. This is how I have become a dark and cynical person: I am, at least in my approach to art, more head than heart – I’ve become overly cerebral. And it’s ruining my Christmas.

There’s other adult stuff getting in the way, too, of course. The older you get, the shorter any individual month becomes in terms of the entire life you’ve lived, and the more you begin to realize that whether it’s Christmas or Halloween or some week in June, you still have to go to work and your boss still needs those TPS reports yesterday. But that, ultimately, I secondary. I mourn my lost Christmas spirit, but some of that is inevitable and I can live with that – it’s just ridiculous to bundle up in a parka to do Christmas shopping when you know perfectly well that it’s going to be sunny and 70 outside. It’s bad enough admitting that – it’s even worse being reminded that every year I become a little more like Ebenezer Scrooge and a little less like his nephew.