If you aren't feeling the holiday spirit, maybe you need to spend more time online.
I'm not talking about the seasonally appropriate applications on Facebook and iPhone, which are hollowly festive at best: Level charges of Grinchiness at me, but I can think of few more pathetic uses for the iPhone than shaking it to kindle warm feelings with the “Christmas Spirit Generator.”
No, I'm talking about social networking.
In 2008, Facebook saw its highest traffic in Britain and the U.S. on Christmas Eve. As with so much news from the ever-broadening frontier of social media, this statistic can seem tragic – a recent New Yorker cartoon showed a holiday gathering with every family member in a room dedicated to a different electronic device and, it goes without saying, not talking. At least not to each other.
But it's only a tragedy if you buy into the notion of the functional, close-knit family gathering. Yeah, yeah, I know, for some of you this isn't mythical. Bully for you, but know that your happy family is just like every other happy family in the world (some Russian writer said that, and they know from misery).
Sure, a lot of netizens were reaching out to friends and family with holiday greetings. But those of you with, um, “one-of-a-kind” families – who among you can honestly say that some time between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day you did not have an urge to vanish through the escape hatch that the Internet provides?
It's my experience that once I start to leave the sphere of my everyday, known life and float into the orbit of prescribed functions populated by near-strangers – which is what family gatherings are for some – I begin compulsively tweeting and Facebooking.
Who among you can say that some time between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day you didn't have an urge to vanish through the escape hatch that the Internet provides?
I tweet, therefore I am. It's a corrective to the creeping sense of unreality that accompanies being in a room full of people who don't get my sense of humour or my cultural references – who don't get, in short, me.
Anyone who can say why artists are compelled to do what they do – write poems or stories, draw sketches or make sculptures and share them with the world – will probably be providing an answer to the question of why we update our Facebook status or post photos that prove the details of our lives at times like these.
It's not so much narcissism, although there will always be people for whom any platform automatically resembles a stage, as a need to be understood. We can't all be Picasso – and who would want to be, anyway? Talk about a narcissist. But we can all ask for the world's eyes for a moment.
Lest anyone fear that the spirit of Christmas is getting lost in all this, Facebook, which charts the U.S.'s Gross National Happiness, announced last year that the happiest day, judging by an analysis of the language contained in its users' status updates, was Dec. 25.
Despite social media or because of it? Hey – talk about it over the turkey. Or over Twitter.
Follow Lisan Jutras on Twitter @lisanjutras
