Dialogue: Learning to love the silly season

By DIANA WICHTEL

I blame Canada. Growing up there, where summer holidays and Christmas are humanely separated by time in which to regain one's mental health, I've found it hard to adjust to the boom and bust rhythms of the New Zealand calendar.

Here, we trudge through 11 featureless months with nothing to hope for but a major international sporting event at which we don't suck. Then comes one frenzied month of shopping, enforced family bonding, packing and hitting the road to holiday in a monsoon, hoping not to be killed by someone similarly stressed.

Why do we do it? I've come to believe, stuck at this remote corner of the world as we are, with little to torment us by global standards, that we thrive on tormenting ourselves. How else to explain our health system, MMP and John Banks?

And there's something to be said for torment. Take Christmas. This year I finally realised that it isn't about consumerism or, goodness knows, peace and goodwill. It's a chance to embrace suffering and grow as a human being (going to the gym doesn't count).

As fewer of us submit to the denials and disciplines of organised religion, here's a chance to do the social equivalent of donning a hair-shirt for a spot of self-flagellation. It can even be pleasurable, as saints and masochists will tell you.

Each irritating in-law, each unwanted gift, is a chance, in these overly individualistic times, to experience self-denial.

The last stragglers three hours late for Christmas dinner? You can practise patience (and, as we did, set up a lucrative flutter on when they'll finally show).

There's a lot to be said for those old religious rituals, especially since many involve wine.

I'm also giving up the quest for the azure, golden, perfect New Zealand holidays of nostalgic memory. If I'm honest, those were the ones I spent in Fiji and Noumea. Far better to accept reality and embrace the imperfect New Zealand holiday.

So our holiday highlights this year included being driven indoors by storms to a museum near Houhora, in the allegedly sub-tropical Far North, where we saw a two-headed lamb, the world's worst-designed vintage typewriter and 142 chamber pots - in other words, an admirably imperfect holiday treat.

This new perspective on holiday expectations did no harm when we arrived at our nearby accommodation, where screaming children were being chased by a fisherman with a boat hook.

"He's mad. He's a pirate," a breathless young local reported. "Come to Houhora for a good kid beating," the pirate called to us, cheerfully doing his bit for local tourism. At least it wasn't raining at the time.

It was persisting down the night we dined at lovely Whangaroa Harbour, along with a crowd of gently steaming boaties under leaking Perspex to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning at the fishing club. It cleared up in time for us to go home. Imperfect holiday bliss.

I even managed to embrace the media silly season, the equivalent of giving up thinking for Lent. There is something admirable in the way local reporters can approach a report from inside a holiday traffic jam as if they were behind enemy lines in Afghanistan.

And, in an uncertain world, there's a reassuring inevitability about holiday headlines such as "Guinea pigs sadly missed" and the latest depressing study on how much fat is in our seasonal fish and chips.

Was it me or was the silly season this year, like the weather, worse than usual?

Even the news from overseas was absurd. International hard man Dubya rendered himself unconscious with a pretzel, lending credence to his political enemies' claims that he's an idiot.

In Britain it was reported that the scientist who has spent years failing to prove the existence of the Loch Ness monster has wisely changed tack and is now claiming it has died of pollution.

Dear oh dear. Back at home, there's the Mayor of Auckland's latest brainwave. It's hard to see what Peter Blake did to deserve a statue that seems to represent him beating off a flock of demented seagulls, as if he's trapped in some lost scene from Hitchcock's The Birds.

John Banks was quoted in some holiday feature as saying he never takes a holiday. He doesn't need to. For some people, every season is the silly season.

As I write, the temperature is soaring, the skies are a deep, mocking blue and most of us are back at work. About this time of year commentators mutter about changing the holiday period to later in the year, when Christmas madness is over and the weather is settled. What wimps.

Better to just accept that our self-imposed annual sufferings are good for our selfish, 21st-century souls. As they say on Oprah, you can see the glass as half empty or you can top it up with the last of the warm bubbly and have another drink.