The worst loneliness at the holidays is less about when you’re just alone and more about when you’re entirely unsought.

It’s beginning to look like it’s not like Christmas. Everywhere you go.

An awakening is underway.
Widespread lack of traditional holiday spirits and festive feelings now have many reevaluating what is actually Christmasy and rediscovering manipulations of the holiday we’ve known all along: years of insidious brainwashing by special interest institutions in doing so.
And thankfully, the change is spreading like a virus.

Global conditions have never forced the complete dismantling of a major holiday and its traditions as we are now experiencing, and it’s sending millions scrambling for suitable temporary replacements that might just recapture those old feelings.

But Christmas was never about feelings, and that lack of plenty may turn out to be its blessed undoing. Christmas has long needed a structural change about its trappings of which more and more complain every year: Getting back to the basics of Christmas is long, long overdue.

The very first Christmas was a simple gathering of strangers for a common cause. Light had come into this dark world with promises to be fulfilled and the attending were either-by chance or providence-that event’s chosen audience.

This holiday will be a remarkably different Christmas for us all as the most remarkable event in human history again chooses each one of us, now separated and alone, to abandon gifts and traditions in favor of bowing down in contemplation and thanks for the only gift that ever really mattered in the first place.

I believe that is both a good change and hopefully, change for good.

At the start, it’s vivid with all the best defenses you ever learned intact rushing to your aid, erected like a wall built for what’s to come. But dreamtime elapses quickly and you sense the erosions begin. First your will, then your reasoning, then the character you’ve worked too hard to lose, and you notice a tiny peep hole the wall offers and you’re curious so you peek in for a glance and a taste of what’s on the other side once again as if you don’t even know after all these sober years. Then something in your sleepy little head yells for you to wake up and grow up before you bite the bait that will surely pull you back into the hell that condemns and torments those who remain asleep.So I woke up. Mine was just an intrusively bad dream I have occasionally even after 9 years clean. For those actively addicted to Meth it’s the restless living war story every second of every day from which they can’t awaken and have stopped trying.

When it’s sunny, it’s too bright. Cloudy, too gloomy. Breezy, too windy. Rainy, too humid. And if it’s perfect, it won’t last, because some people can still find hell in a spoonful of heaven.

A three time cancer survivor at 78 with no remaining family, she fears the odds won’t be in her favor this trip.Lab work was completed two weeks ago and she’s so afraid, she’s gone without renewing her prescriptions for the fleeting feeling of having saved $38.She says it’s actually not so much the news but of not having someone there with her when she gets it. Just for an hour to help her through it and get her home safely afterward back to an empty apartment to ponder her options. Thisis.loneliness and a true story with dozens more just like it all over town every day.Especially this season, be a new friend to an old one if you can spare the time because someday you may be there yourself.I know sad stories aren’t popular this time of year, but then sad stories aren’t popular any time of year. And because friendship always is, we got in the car.