The big comedown

This is always one of the strangest weeks of the year. All this build-up -- the lights, the mistletoe, the endless rounds of rum-laced eggnog -- and then it ends, not with a grand symphonic crescendo but with a whimpering note from a lonely trumpet. Pauly Shore movies have had less disappointing climaxes.

Sometimes you have to wonder if the holidays justify all the preamble.

Not that I’m trying to be a Scrooge or anything. I like Christmas. This time of year it’s pretty much all I can write about, which either makes me lazy or a huge hypocrite, considering my Yule-crazed scribblings are a very part of the build-up I’m criticising. (Let’s be generous and say I’m a lazy hypocrite. Schoolchildren have called me worse names, and more recently than I’d care to admit.)

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, consider the day after Christmas. It tends to be one of the more depressing days of the year. There are no gifts left to give. No cards left to write. The turkeys and yams have all disappeared into our gastrointestinal systems. And if the tree is still up, it suddenly seems like an intruder, an oddity completely out-of-place next to our treadmills and Big Lots couches. Having a tree in your living room after the holidays are over is like smelling an apple pie when you’re already full: Unwanted and inexplicably aggravating.

It shouldn’t be that way, and doesn’t have to be. Nobody gets that feeling after a successful party, for instance. Let’s say Janet Binklebottom plans a birthday party for her best friend, Cathy Crustybritches. It promises to be a pretty extravagant affair, with a clown making balloon animals and a live band ripping through Styx covers while stage smoke blows from the nostrils of a plastic dragon. Fun stuff. Binklebottom sends a notice out to their friends three weeks in advance of the big blowout.

Now Cathy Crustybritches has a choice. She can mark the big event on her calendar and then proceed with her normal day-to-day life, working as a partner at her law firm, Crustybritches, Poopydiapers and Smith. Or she can turn the lead-up to the party into a marathon of colored lights, shopping sprees, gingerbread cookies and special Crustybritches birthday carols.

Option one: She goes to the party, has a great time, and feels awesome the next day. Totally worth the hangover, and wow, did you see that dragon smoke machine?

Option two: She goes to the party, has an okay time, but the next day she’s down in the dumps because there’ll be no more cookies and carols. The fun season is over. Despondent, she quits her job at the law firm and spends the rest of her days making stone tools in a cave in Bangladesh.

OK, so Carol’s a bit melodramatic. I can still understand the feeling.

The old saying goes, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” and there’s some truth to that. December’s typically a fun month because of all the fatty food and general shenanigans, to say nothing of the animatronic snowmen and lawn-gobbling reindeer tableaus. It just ends too suddenly -- a speeding train smashing into a brick wall, an adventure cut short. That day-after-Christmas feeling is a sort of mental whiplash. That’s why some people keep their trees up until February, when the skeletal evergreens are less fa-la-la-la-la and more fire hazard.

That’s why Christmas should last longer.

Not the Christmas season, mind you. That’s plenty long already, starting as it does roughly seven-and-a-half minutes after Independence Day ends. I’m talking about the holiday itself -- the family get-togethers, the movie marathons, the drunken renditions of “Santa Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” The way things are now, the giant build-up comes to a head on a single day, and there’s always this odd pressure to cram in as many festivities as possible to make the whole thing seem worth it. Presumably there are 12 days of Christmas, with seven lords a-leapin’ and six aunts a-belchin’, or however the song goes. So let’s act like it.

Dec. 25 can remain much the way it is. No need to mess with a good thing. After that, though, the whole infrastructure of holiday reverie should be dismantled gradually. On the 26th, the outdoor lights and manger scenes can come down -- Jesus, Mary and Joseph relegated once more to the basement, where they share space with riding lawn mowers and boxes filled with ceramic cats. On the 27th, the stockings come down. On the 28th, you kick Santa off the couch and drive him to the airport in your dented Dodge Dart, where he catches a plane back to the North Pole while quashing his gingerbread-filled stomach with a box of antacid tablets. And so on, until on the last day you finally take down your tree, ornaments and all, to be placed on the sidewalk, where crews bring it out to the transfer station and turn it into No. 2 pencils. This serves the dual purpose of cleansing your home while fulfilling your New Year’s resolution to recycle more. Yay, Earth!

Finally, when all is done, you can concentrate on settling in for a long winter of frozen eyelashes and doubled-up boxer briefs.

When divers surface from ocean depths too quickly, they get decompression sickness -- a.k.a., “the bends.” Next year, let’s avoid the Christmas bends by giving ourselves a gradual comedown. It’s the least we can do to honor the Crustybritches legacy.