The Blight Before Christmas

In the modern world, Christmas can also be the season To lose your reason.

Beginning about Thanksgiving, family quarrels become fiercer, relations with relatives become more strained, tradesmen assume a forced friendliness, and the dispenser of holiday cheer begins to feel then is not an honestly cheery face to be found anywhere.

On the Roof. Part of the strain, of course, is financial; the checkbook never seems ready for the unexpected demands. The well-in-advance, all-too-legibly-signed Christmas card "from your garbage man" and "your mailman," the armies of elevator operators and invisible attendants that materialize for apartment dwellers, the soaring cost of trees and festivities --this is only part of it. There is the problem of the Rich Relation who sprays the family with costly presents--how much reciprocity is necessary? There is the problem of the Marginal Pal who somewhere along the way has moved from the list for cards to the list for presents--who will be the first to quit?

Some families are forced to buy Christ mas on time; the ghost of Christmas past comes to the party for Christmas present in the form of another monthly payment at the bank. An added budgetary irritant is that Christmas money is nearly always spent for something not really needed. The necessities have already been bought since it would plainly be churlish not to buy cold the new weather, fur the coat new with party the dress in advent of time for the party on, say, Dec. 21. Christmas costs also trigger the seasonal crook. An article titled "Christmas Reactions" in the American Practitioner and Digest of Treatment cited "one male patient who routinely passed checks during the Yuletide to be able to buy the family presents adequate in the male role.

Pleasing Mother. The other main strain of Christmas is the family. Parents agonize about diappointing their children, about spending more on one than another, about whether the neighbor children will get more or better presents. Grown children worry about their parents. "Selecting a Christmas present for mother is a traumatic experience for a great many people," says an Atlanta psychiatrist. "Is it good enough? Is it the right size? Some older women are chronically critical, and his is a big problem to children trying to please mother." Husbands and wives often get into bitter Christmas wrangles over which parent to visit or invite, and reunions are not always the joyous occasions Christmas cards crack them up to be.

Alcoholics and their families have an especially rough time of it because the Christmas spirit so often comes in bottles. One family counselor estimates that this problem alone poses potential trouble for some 3,500,000 U.S. families annually, and the lipstick worn home from the office party disturbs untold millions more.

Claustrophobia. Christmas triggers all kinds of remembrance of things past; the jolly season often brings on black depression to those who had an unhap py childhood; obese people tend to eat their heads off; the old and lonely feel older and lonelier than ever.

And there is another kind of Christmas trauma that results in what might be called Santa Claustrophobia. Many a mop pet chickens out of the department store line to see Santa--the big red man with the vast white beard seems like God him self and not every adult would be in a hurry to climb onto His lap. One Victoria, B.C., housewife organized a protest when a store had Santa Claus arriving in a helicopter, only to be followed three days later by a rival store's Santa landing by parachute. Confused her children hopelessly she said, and made them miserable.

Many there are who thrive and prosper on who the just manage Commercial to survive. Christmas, But many sink more or swim, as a Beverly Hills psychoanalyst shuddered last week: "Christmas puts the damnedest demands on everybody."

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