... This is your Christmas on drugs

Anyone who knows me well or who's been reading here for a few years knows that A) my mom died 10 days before Christmas many years ago; and B) I get VERY blue this time of year. And bonus — C) Many, many years ago, my mom and I sat in a hospital in Lincoln, Neb., and watched as my grandmother slowly succumbed to sepsis, dying two days after Christmas.

In case you've never seen anyone go septic, let me tell you: It has got to rank up there as one of the worst ways to watch someone die. IT IS AWFUL. I've seen it twice and hope to never, EVER see it again.

So, yeah. Just not my favorite time of year. I usually fall into a very deep funk that I end up clawing my way out of sometime between right after Thanksgiving and early January.

And I am really happy to say that this year is different.

For starters, we started decorating a couple of days after Thanksgiving, and over the course of that weekend, we put up all our decorations (not many, mind you — a self-professed Scrooge does not acquire much in the way of holiday festivity), went and bought our tree, and put up a record number of lights outside the house. We even took the boys to a Christmas movie and, afterward, drove them over to a nearby park and ran in the cold and crispy darkness under all the lit trees, laughing and enjoying watching the boys scream with utter joy.

And I did not shed a single tear. And I think I can safely say — and Jerry would confirm — that I didn't even get a little grumpy.

It's a damn Christmas miracle.

No. Really.

So why the change? Well, there are probably a few reasons, chief among them the fact that for the better part of a year, I have been taking anti-depressants. It's probably not something I should be announcing on this here blog, but I'll be damned if I feel the slightest bit of shame or embarrassment about it. Here's the deal: I was sad. I needed help. I finally — FINALLY — went out and got some.

Depression is something I have suffered from my entire life, or at least my entire adult life. It's a bitch to wake up one day and know that life is gonna suck for an indeterminate amount of time. And to know that, for approximately six to eight weeks at the end of every year, you're gonna want to crawl under a blanket and not come out.

At best, that's what it felt like.

And last year was pretty bad. So, at the end of December, I just decided enough was enough and I was going to take control of my life. I've done that in more ways than one this year, and it has had some interesting effects and led me down some interesting paths, but it started, I believe, that day when I finally acknowledged that I needed help. And if that help was gonna come in the form of a little white pill and a few of my hard-earned dollars going to the evil pharma-industry, then so be it.

If you suffer from depression, let me encourage you to take the same steps I did. I mean, it's not like I walk around all day singing about lollipops and envisioning happy puppies jumping under rainbows. Good god, it hasn't changed me THAT significantly — I'm still prone to making sarcastic remarks without the slightest provocation, I still get grumpy, I'm your girl if you want to sit in a public place and make fun of people, I still roll my eyes at some of my wonderful husband's Pollyanna-esque worldviews — but it has changed my world significantly.

And chief among the visible evidence of that change is that I have enjoyed this last week very much. I've enjoyed watching the boys delight at every little colored light, every jingle bell. Smiled as they played with the Christmas village that belonged to my mom. Felt a rush of excitement as Jerry climbed a 30-foot ladder approximately 30 times to string lights up near our roof.

I am a little sad, to be honest, to be leaving my fellow members of the Scrooge Club behind. They are the minority this time of year, and it was a pretty fun group of people to be aligned with (the depressed are often wickedly funny, you know ...).

But I can't say I miss the black fog.

So there's my Christmas gift — good drugs that work. I need nothing else.

And I think Rogene Scott would be pretty damn happy about this development.