How Is Your Self-Image This Christmas?

Danny Tyree on Dec 15, 2021

Tyrades! by Danny Tyree

I distinctly remember what I ate for supper on Christmas Eve 50 years ago.

Not the entrée perhaps, but certainly the vegetable.

My mother served stewed potatoes (“potato slopters,” as she dubbed them).

I remember the potatoes because I was passionately reading my newly purchased 25-cent comic book (“Justice League of America” Vol. 1 #96, featuring the JLA versus Starbreaker the Cosmic Vampire) at the dining room table and splashed the food all over it.

That damaged comic book still has a place of honor in my old bedroom. And it serves as a metaphor for the extreme ways some people regard themselves in relation to the one who is the Reason for the Season.

Back in 1971 I could’ve had a perfectionist meltdown and discarded the comic book as a soiled, worthless piece of garbage.

I recognized that I had defaced the periodical, but I nonetheless saw the enduring non-monetary worth of it. It remained perfectly readable. It retains sentimental value. And its continued existence means it can be passed on to future generations.

What does that have to do with self-image? Well, many people feel particularly useless, helpless and unloved at this time of year.

Whether it’s because of family reputation, poverty, chronic illness, an ugly divorce, substance abuse or some other calamity, some folks view themselves as irredeemable – permanently stained and hopeless. They see their only alternatives as either more self-pity or a “George Bailey” suicide attempt.

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