The most miserable time of the year?

Notions of holiday cheer and joy are everywhere—they're actually inescapable—here during the last half of December. And for some, that’s what makes it worse, because they have no joy to share.

Be honest and look within your family and your circle of acquaintances, and you're sure to find one or two broken ones there. This is their first Christmas without a loved one, or separated from children, or lonely and friendless in a new town.

Watch carefully at the mall, and you'll see them acting out their sadness while the store speakers blare "Little Drummer Boy" and fevered shoppers scrum at the "Reduced!" counter.

* Here's an elderly woman in a shabby tweed coat with complementary hat and pocketbook poring over the "Merry Christmas, Daughter" greeting cards, shaking her head, trying to make sense of the $5.99 price tag and her child's aloofness.

* See a frantic young man shopping solo at 11 p.m., MasterCard in hand, rounding up big, gaudy, colorful toys enough for a Little League team because he's permitted only four hours of supervised visitation with his two little ones.

* Witness a wistful, frail woman sighing over the Old Spice kitsch she used to buy for the man she once loved, and this year, he's gone.

Perhaps the saddest cases are those who, as we say, brought it on themselves through arrogance, addiction, temptation, over-confidence or just simply outsmarting themselves.

Regret is said to be the most durable of human emotions, and in December, it's bulletproof.

I'm nothing special, but for 10 Christmases, I needed permission to see my little boy on Christmas, and then, only at his mother's convenience. Maybe I deserved the punishment and sadness because of some personality defect or husbandly shortcoming, but the actual grief was visited on my boy. He was forced into a two-part holiday with two separately over-anxious parents.

In the middle of those 10 years, my dad fell over dead on Dec. 2 while dressing up for a holiday party. A spouse of 37 years, a loving father of three and Grandpa to seven youngsters was gone—poof—in an instant. My mom, who cradled his body until the paramedics arrived, never did get over it. And, looking back at it 29 years later, I don't think she even tried.

Despite the barrage of year-end charity appeals (most of which, after all, are tax-avoidance-related), poverty is not the great destroyer of holiday happiness. Certainly, it's any parent's sorrow to be unable to deliver the goods under the tree on Christmas morning. But, if you're doing a good job the rest of the year, the kids will get over it by suppertime.

We know from Charles Dickens, Tiny Tim and Clark Griswold that affection, not cash, is the currency of the season. The real biting ghosts of Christmas are loss and disconnection.

Can you help somebody who is down for the holidays? Can you be a little understanding of their unhappiness and spare them some compassion? Perhaps you'll feel better if you do.

Whatever your religious persuasion (if any), you may find that spirit is the thing.

Abraham Lincoln expressed a belief that sounds good all the time and especially during the holidays. He declared: "When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion."

Perhaps you can't actually give joy to the world. But what there is of it, you might be able to help share it around.

The author is a South Hills resident and a regular contributor to the Baldwin-Whitehall Patch.