Quick trivia question for everyone: What times of year have the highest suicide rates in this country, by which I mean the United States?

You've either heard this one before, you're really good at guessing where seemingly random questions are going or you got this wrong. The answer is, of course, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Perhaps the time in between also possesses a high death toll, that would make good sense, but definitely localized around those two holidays.

Does this shock anyone? It did me, when I heard that years ago, but after a bit of thought, it made perfect sense. In fact, no other time could possibly have the suicide potential. You have two times when family is emphasized. Two periods around which everyone is inundated with images of fantastically happy people: couples deeply in love, children laughing and spending wonderful quality time with parents, friends gathering for parties of happy chatter and singing. You have the aura of tremendous presents being passed back and forth, happiness both in the giving as well as the receiving.

Now suppose you have no family...that you're in touch with or close to, in any case. You don't particularly love anyone, no one really loves or cares about you. You have no significant other, and haven't for years. You have no good friends. You have no one to spend time with, and no one to buy gifts for. And you have no money to buy gifts, even if you had someone to buy for. All you have is an empty studio apartment and a beckoning life of nothing...which only hurts all the more when the entire world, it seems, is celebrating love and enjoying life.

That's bad enough. The ironic twist is still to come, though. The truth is that all of that happiness swirling through everyone else in the nation is just a fantasy. It's an image ideal cultivated by the media, through commercials and sickly sweet television specials. It's a construction of the holidays that a shockingly few number of people experience in the pure, vivid form that it's portrayed. Most people are in between family joy and completely barren lives. Too many people are closer to the barren lives end of the spectrum. People are committing suicide because their lives simply don't live up to an ideal that virtually no one's lives up to.

And yet, knowing all that, the holidays still have such power. Even to me, someone who is cynical towards artificial dynamics; I find myself both anticipating and dreading these holidays. Certainly, as a kid, I loved the holidays for all they were supposed to be...and were. I was one of the lucky ones who's holiday experiences came close to matching the media construction, of family, friends, happiness, and all the rest. It was time off from school. It was Good in every possible way.

Today, that's bittersweet. No matter what else happens, things change just by growing older. You can't ever recapture youthful perception, the willful lack of knowledge of what lies ahead one day, the general lack of worries. No one lives in the moment like a child. It's automatic at that age, and adults have to spend years of training to live in the moment in order to reduce stress after their second heart attack. Things change just by aging, putting the old experiences forever out of reach. Province of memories alone.

Then there are the other things that can change. My father passed away around Christmas, one year recently. That's one of those types of things that can really taint a holiday for you. And even if I were squirrel-memoried enough not to recall that until Christmas each year, Thankgiving would be tainted by incredibly hard blows about my father's health in the two Thanksgivings prior to his passing. It's like Thanksgiving, for a short time, was the predetermined holiday to get worse and worse news.

That makes things tougher for me on those holidays. Especially in combination with the memories of how things once were. And yet, there's still an aura of happiness that can't be denied. I'm still looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even though it won't ever be what it was, I still have hopes that it can be nice.

And that's a touching testiment to the power of media manipulation. How warming during the cold season.