Fallen Christmas Stars
The day Christmas decors make you think about fear.
About two weeks into the New Year, the hospital I work in started taking down Christmas decorations. On my way home in January, I saw a big yellow parol on the floor. It used to hang from the ceiling along with its sister parols. I found it amusing—it was a literal fallen star, whose fate was either in the trash or in storage for the next Christmas. I remember that scene from the 2007 film Stardust, where Yvaine, the fallen star, lay flat in the crater her downfall created, much like the parol I saw today.
It also felt quite sad, how this signifies the end of Christmas. I almost thought it was too early; shouldn’t the Christmas lights be up until January (as per Taylor Swift)? Or even February? It wasn’t even Valentines’ Day then!
I looked around and saw that the parol wasn’t the only casualty. The big Christmas tree in the atrium was gone, along with the Christmas lights strewn along various nurses’ stations. The Christmas decor made of recycled materials (anywhere from mechanical ventilation tubes, syringes, vials, and surgical caps) was nowhere to be found. The fallen star I saw today was but the last vestige of Christmas. When I got home, I noticed our Christmas decorations were packed up too. The Christmas wreath, the stockings, the red and gold table runner, the belen. All gone. Christmas was officially over.
December always goes by notoriously fast. It’s like a month-long rush hour, people scrambling from one shop to the next, from one party to another. I’m all for the warm and fuzzy festivities of the holidays, but it does feel incredibly exhausting sometimes, jumping from one celebration or party to another. And then, before you know it, December is over, and you’re bolstered straight into the New Year.
The first half of January is a huge adjustment period, with people just getting their bearings and picking up momentum. Sure, people are back to work, but certainly no one wants to be at work yet. We’re all in a holiday daze, and we need time to get it together. Everyone is usually more forgiving around this time, like some mutual understanding that nobody is in the mood to be productive yet.
But when the Christmas decorations get taken down, you know it’s back to business.
This is why, as much as I’m amused by the fallen star, the more predominant emotion is anxiety. It means that the free passes, the next times, the “Pasko naman”’s are all down the drain now. All the I’ll-do-it-in-the-New-Year promises have finally caught up with us. Now I have to get to work. Now that’s terrifying.
It’s been two months since then, and life has found a new steady state. Work has piled on top of each other. The fear is still there, but rather than a deafening noise, it becomes white noise that spikes in volume now and then. It creeps up when a new stressor comes along, but never truly silenced. Even the Christmas decorations don’t eliminate fear. Maybe the Christmas songs are just better at drowning out fear, albeit temporarily.
The good news (or maybe what I choose to tell myself) is that we can adjust the volume. Fear can be loud enough to disturb you or barely audible to even register its presence. It’s a whole Goldilocks situation, to find the right volume we allow ourselves to hear. As with many things in life, fear is something we learn to live with.
