Holiday Recycling Season: Welcome Back to the Machine

(A Crack-Side Field Note on the Most Emotionally Efficient Time of Year)

Every December, humanity reenacts the same ancient ritual:

The Great Recycling.

Not plastic.

Not wrapping paper.

Not your neighbor’s fruitcake that’s been re-gifted since the Reagan administration.

I mean emotional recycling —

the annual re-compression of obligation, guilt, nostalgia, tribal roles, religious prophecy, political panic, family trauma, and “holiday cheer”

into one thick psychic paste.

A gift-wrapped egregore smoothie.

And we drink it like eggnog.

The Machine Loves the Holidays

This is the most efficient time of year for the harvesting engine.

It doesn’t even need to try.

Everything is preloaded:

family roles (healer, failure, helper, scapegoat)
economic panic (buy or be unlovable)
religious tension (“Keep Christ in Christmas!” or the annual rapture countdown)
political hysteria (tribal warfare disguised as dinner conversation)
New Age guilt (heal your lineage! clear your karma! save twelve galaxies before brunch!)

It all collapses into one giant compression wave.

You feel it before you even hang up a wreath—

that creeping braid of nostalgia, joy, and sour fear coiling up like it’s about to jam itself straight up your…

nope, let’s reroute that —

into the same emotional outlet you swore you unplugged last year.

That’s the annual upload.

Same story. Different wrapping.

The Real Recycling: The Emotional Kind

You know how Black Friday looks like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan?

People leaping over each other for an Xbox or a doll that poops like a real baby?

You don’t even have to be there to feel that desperation-rattle in your nervous system.

The holidays recycle:

your old guilt
your childhood wounds
your sense of obligation
your fear of disappointing people
your religious leftovers
your shame scripts
the pressure to radiate enough love to heal a small quadrant of the galaxy while trying to find a parking space

It’s all the same crap, looped from last year, coded to extract another round of emotional charge.

The squid in a Santa hat.

Why This Year Feels Worse

Because the world is collapsing under its own narrative mass.

Competing stories, amplified through every screen you own, are clawing for your attention the way black holes claw for light.

Religion wants you.

Politics wants you.

Apocalypse wants you.

Crypto wants you.

Your mother wants you.

The algorithm wants you.

Your anxiety wants you.

Once they get your attention, they can hijack your intention.

And that’s how people end up living tight, suffocating lives:

You intend to “just get through the day.”

You intend to “pick up another shift.”

You intend to “pay off that cruise from two years ago” while your friends are already planning the next one so they don’t have to feel alone in their loop.

That’s narrative gravity.

It hooks your life-force until you’re orbiting someone else’s storyline.

And December?

It hits like a gravitational wave.

Even if you haven’t decorated since the Bush administration, you feel the pressure.

I don’t decorate — my husband does — but we know people who go so full Hallmark that the North Pole would sue for copyright.

Still, some tiny feral child-part of me remembers the idea of Christmas.

Or rather, Yule — the real one, before Coca-Cola redesigned it.

Back when it wasn’t about salvation or sales but about winter, fire, food, and surviving with whoever hadn’t pissed you off that year.

But when December hits, something strange happens:

everyone gets tied together by an invisible, humming rope, whether you celebrate or not.

And the internal scripts start firing:

“I don’t even celebrate this.”
“I hate Christmas.”
“X-mass! Burn it all down.”
“He didn’t even use what I got him last year…”
“Now I have to outgift my own guilt.”
“BUY THE GAME BEFORE IT SELLS OUT.”

These aren’t personal thoughts.

They’re holiday code.

We can’t hold the charge, so we compact it, hide it, deny it — and it turns into emotional black ice.

I spent decades behind the salon chair watching this:

symbolic ecosystems orbiting people — planets of guilt, envy, hope, dread — drifting between their field and mine.

Not metaphors.

Actual images.

Emotional satellites trying to resolve themselves.

This isn’t “holiday spirit.”

This is holiday recursion — a recycling plant of unprocessed emotional debris, all pretending to be festive.

And if you don’t know how to step sideways, the field will pull you straight back across the emotional event horizon and into the same loop — not as punishment, but because that’s what unexamined story always does.

A Note for Those Feeling Loss This Season

The holidays don’t just recycle guilt —

they recycle grief.

When someone you love is gone, December doesn’t whisper.

It hits like a steel-toed boot.

It spotlights the empty chair, the missing voice, the shape that should be there.

And the pain of that is real.

But hidden underneath that grief is another layer — the heavier one:

the story overlay.

Because every human being is naturally telepathic.

Not in the Hollywood sense with sparks and lightning bolts and a demon chick in leather (that’s Supernatural).

I mean the quiet, real thing:

direct knowing.

direct presence.

the unmistakable sense that your loved one is still “there,” even if they aren’t “here.”

Everyone is born with this.

It never went away.

It was shamed out of you.

We’re taught to fear and misinterpret our own psychic senses:

“That’s just your imagination.”

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s demonic.”

“You need closure.”

“You’re not supposed to still feel them.”

Stories taught you to distrust who you are.

So when someone dies, the connection doesn’t end.

The signal stays.

What collapses is your permission to trust it.

That ache in your chest?

That sudden warmth?

That dream that wasn’t a dream?

That moment in the kitchen when you swear someone was standing right behind you?

That’s not delusion.

That’s not malfunctioning grief.

That’s your telepathic channel trying to break through the static.

And the static is the story system.

Which brings us right back to the holidays:

That pressure isn’t yours.

That’s the holiday egregore trying to recruit your grief into its machinery —

trying to turn pure connection into emotional fuel.

But in the Crack, the distortion falls away.

You can miss them without collapsing.

You can feel them without performing it.

You can let the ache be clean instead of contaminated by story.

And you realize something simple:

Your loved ones aren’t gone.

Not as souls floating in suburban heaven.

Not as ghosts.

But as geometry.

Strands.

Presence.

Memory-shapes still tethered to you in the field.

You don’t have to fear that.

You don’t have to hide it.

You don’t have to dress it up for the season.

It’s just connection.

Quiet.

Real.

Uncomplicated.

And awareness — being massless —

cannot be compressed by holiday gravity.

The Crack at Christmastime

This is where it gets funny.

While everyone else is:

reenacting their childhood scripts
panicking at Walmart
dragging their emotional baggage through TSA
preparing for prophetic meltdown
performing joy for social media

You’re over in the Crack like:

Not taking the bait.

This is the one place the emotional composting machine can’t digest you.

You don’t recycle.

You don’t feed the squid.

You don’t download from the jellyfish.

You don’t collapse into the loop.

You observe the pull —

and don’t go with it.

You move cleanly.

You’re basically sipping cocoa on the edge of a black hole watching humanity reenact a Hallmark possession ritual.

Because the only way out of narrative collapse

is to have no narrative.

Not a better one.

Not a more positive one.

Not a healed one.

None.

Just the Between.

The Crack.

Presence without story.

THE HOLIDAY CRACK PROTOCOL

(This is the practical extraction plan.)

1. Notice the Pull — but don’t name it

Whatever grabs you — guilt, dread, shame, pressure — pause.

This isn’t “your” feeling.

It’s the script booting up.

2. Remember the Rule

If the feeling isn’t excitement, curiosity, knowing, or natural aliveness —

it’s holiday code recruiting you.

3. Tag It

Say (silently or out loud):

“This is not mine.

I do not agree to feel this.”

Instant distance.

4. Break the Trance (Physical Step)

Take one literal step left or right.

If you can’t move, imagine it.

Your body learns instantly:

the emotion is there;

you are here.

5. Feel the Sensation (Not the Story)

Drop the narrative.

Let the sensation be heat, tightness, buzzing, pressure.

Sensation dissolves.

Story loops.

6. Settle Into Neutrality

Slip into:

“I’m here.

I’m not in the loop.”

No effort.

Just stance.

7. Watch the Loop Like Weather

Everyone else is still reenacting.

You’re on the ridge watching the storm.

8. Don’t Feed It

No arguing.

No fixing.

No performing.

No emotional Velcro.

Loops starve when you stop participating.

9. Move Cleanly

Once the noise collapses, act from neutral:

Simple.