The mood swings of the post-holiday season

Lou Marzeles
News Editor

     So I came home the other day to find my mailbox listing hard to starboard. The street had just been plowed of snow, and my mailbox evidently was in the driver's way and so got pushed back.
     I'll quickly grant that's a statement that reflects irritation and presumes a motive that may not have been there. I recognize that it does indeed irritate me that my mailbox, mounted securely on a very sturdy four-by-four, is going to have to be remounted, through not the slightest fault of my own. It makes me wonder who's going to pay for that. (I'm going to find out.) But I'm not here to whine about a listing mailbox or the driver who made it list.
     Rather, I'm intrigued with how easy it is to shift from Christmas congeniality, with its omnipresent good will and high spirits, to the seemingly jolting harsh light of a new year where there are such things as mistreated mailboxes.
     A hundred years from now, how much will the mailbox matter? Or 10 years from now? Next year? Next month? Tomorrow? OK, tomorrow it'll probably still be something of an issue, but you get my point.
     It doesn't help to be manic-depressive about the holidays, where all is joyful manic bliss at Christmas, blind revelry on New Year's Eve, then depressingly routine as the calendar flips to the first.      I suspect there's some of that in all of us, to varying degrees. I think it's a good idea to knock it off.
     It's far more preferable, to my sense, to maintain an equilibrium of attitude, to celebrate high occasions with commensurate emotion, but then to dismiss the tendency to the mundane in its wake. For all I know, the plow driver feels bad about hitting my mailbox. Why invent rancor when one can choose otherwise?