Fourth Quarter Dread
When people hear the term “fourth quarter” they typically think of one of two things – something to do with the business cycle of a business or corporation, or a football game. Well I’m happy to announce that the title of this article has nothing to do with either, a business cycle or a football game. What it does have to do with is the typical annual calendar, more specifically the last three months, or quarter of the year, October, November and December.
Now I know for a lot of people these are probably their favorite three months. The hot, humid weather of summer has finally yielded and transformed into the cooler temperatures of autumn. Sweatshirts, jackets and sweaters abound. Holidays loom on the horizon. Life is good, or at least a bit more comfortable and exciting.
October initiates the changes, and with it brings a beautiful assortment of oranges, gold, yellows, reds and browns as the forests prepare for their long, well-deserved rest; the very air smells different.
Along with the changes nature brings comes apple picking, pumpkin picking, colorful mums, cornstalks for decorating lamp posts, corn mazes, carriage rides, apple cider and donuts, and television programmers offering a full array of college and professional football games that will last well into the new year. Finally, October says goodbye with the first of many “celebrations”, Halloween, requiring meticulous decorating and revelry.
Next comes November. The trees are all but bare now and the final leaf raking and yard clean up takes place. Temperatures continue to get cooler, football rivalries continue to get hotter, Christmas shopping and preparations start in earnest, and the first of the “big three” holidays arrives right on schedule, the fourth Thursday of the month, Thanksgiving. Ah November, leftover turkey, turkey sandwiches with stuffing and cranberry sauce, turkey soup, turkey “pretty much everything”. Life is good.
Finally, December, the last month of the year arrives. By this time trees have finally nodded off to sleep and what few leaves may be left on the lawn are allowed to fend for themselves. Snow tires are put on the car, snow plow markers line the driveway, the last hardy outdoor plants succumb to the cold, college football Bowl games, all 237,485 of them are announced and played, and pro football playoffs come into focus.
And then there’s Christmas – Christmas planning, shopping, purchasing, decorating are all in full swing in anticipation of the arrival of Christmas Day, the big kahuna of all the holidays. Finally, December 25th arrives, presents are ripped opened with reckless abandon, stocking contents are dumped onto the floor, families come together in full holiday regalia and obligatory holiday cheer and then, in what seems to be the blink of an eye, all the anticipation, all the planning, all the doing is suddenly over. The only thing that remains is making it to December 31st, New Year’s Eve, when we celebrate the coming of a new year, new promise, and new possibilities.
What a three months!!!... for some, but not necessarily so much for others. I have to confess that I struggle during the last few months of the year. Oh, I love the cooler weather and I am a huge college football fan, although even I can get college football overload given the seemingly endless options for watching games, not including the three-hour College Game Day warm up show. Games from noon until midnight on Saturdays, games on Tuesdays, games on Thursdays, games on Fridays and then of course there’s the never-ending array of college bowl games. Yep, television programmers have proven the old adage true - too much of a good thing isn’t necessarily a better thing.
Cooler weather, a reasonable diet of college football and apple cider donuts aside, I still struggle with the last three months of the year. The holidays and all the activity leading up to them serve as callous, uncaring, cold-hearted reminders of loss, of who and what is missing.
Oh I get that “such is the circle of life,” and without us to continue on, those who would come after us won’t have anything to miss if we allow the things we miss to die. But still, so much has changed. I wonder if what I miss would be missed by those coming after me? I suppose that I’m not alone in feeling the disparity between what everything and everyone around me tells me I should be feeling, and what is actually occurring in the depths of my soul.
I suppose if it were just a matter of missing people and certain traditions, I could eventually find my way out of the abyss, but it’s more than that, much more. I guess I don’t understand why we wait for Thanksgiving Day to come together, stuff ourselves to the gills, pass out on the couch and eventually give thanks.
Couldn’t we, shouldn't we be doing that every day, minus the passing out on the couch thing? As a Christian I don’t understand why we come together one day a year to celebrate the birth of Jesus – couldn’t we, shouldn’t we be doing that all year round?
Couldn’t we celebrate, give thanks, enjoy family, eat, drink, make merry all year round? Couldn’t we give gifts and give of ourselves in May and June and July just as easily as we do at Thanksgiving and Christmas? Why do we need a handful of days to do the things we should be doing, and act the way we should be acting, all of the time?
I remember a time when you would never see a Christmas decoration in a store until the day after Thanksgiving at the earliest. Now I start seeing Christmas items creeping into store displays in July and August. Have holidays just become an excuse… an excuse to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to give to people who will wonder, “What the heck were they thinking?”; an excuse to only have to deal with certain people a few days a year; an excuse to only have to be kind, and giving, to be present, to remember and to give thanks on an extremely limited basis?
No, I’m not a curmudgeon; I’m not a Hum Bug or a Scrooge, quite the opposite. I believe with all my heart in what the holidays stand for, so much so that I don’t believe that their spirit and the actualization of that spirit should be limited to a handful of days a year.
I don’t believe we need endless months of shopping, and tens of millions of dollars of spending and credit card debt to capture the spirit of what the holidays are meant to stand for. I believe that the true meaning of the holidays is a “heart thing”. Yeah, I know it’s easier to spend a few bucks on a gift then to give of ourselves, but I wonder, how many people would look at the gift of your heart and wonder, “What the heck were they thinking?”