Jolly isn't mandatory

This could be the year's bleakest day. The sun will arc somewhere else. There will be precisely eight hours and 26 minutes of drizzling graylight.

Go with it, says Joanne Carlson Brown. Instead of belting carols into the gloaming or draping halogen candy canes off your gutters, maybe this year you are feeling just how dark the dark really is.

Step into it, at least for a spell. It might be the tonic that gets you through.

The other day, Brown, the new pastor at Tibbetts United Methodist Church in West Seattle, held a service called "Blue Christmas." There were no tidings of joy. No harking of heralds.

She read a poem about darkness. A prayer on longing. There was a box of Kleenex in every pew.

"I felt there needed to be a place where you don't have to be jolly," Brown says. "Just an hour where you don't have to be in the festive spirit the culture says you must be in. Where you can escape all these feelings of forced joy."

To which I say: Hallelujah! I'm no churchgoer, but this is one thing I love about churches. They tread where the rest of society won't.

This week especially, some are inviting you to embrace your inner Humbug. To speak its name, whether it's a death in the family, loneliness or some inexplicable yuletide malaise. Unlike at the tree-lightings, singalongs and corporate cheer-passings, they won't chide you to brighten up.

On Saturday, at 6 p.m., the Rev. Sandy Messick will hold a "Longest Night" service, at University Christian Church in Seattle. She began last year's sermon like this: "It's the most wonderful time of the year. Except when it's not."

She said people overwhelmingly were grateful to hear that it's OK to be crosswise of the seasonal spirit.

"It's not about hating Christmas," Messick says. "Some times all the ho-ho-ho-ing and fa-la-la-ing doesn't sit right. This is for people who are finding it hard."

I had my own holiday from hell some years ago. I was unemployed and newly dumped. A friend suggested I seek joy on the Christmas ships.

That person is not my friend anymore. When you are blue, bobbing in the wake of a yacht broadcasting high-decibel Christmas pop feels like being clubbed in the head with a wassail bowl. Over and over. By the abominable snowman.

It's true, though, sometimes you can't see the light unless you're in the darkness.

That same year, I dreaded New Year's Eve. More decking the halls with boughs of holly I didn't have. But another friend had a way out. We'd begin watching "Apocalypse Now," he said, at exactly 10 p.m.

The movie has a run time of 2 hours, 33 minutes. Meaning that rabbit hole into the darkest heart of the human soul would emerge on the other side of midnight. It would be the fresh year. Auld acquaintance would not only be forgot. It would be skipped entirely.

So by the time Colonel Kurtz said "the horror, the horror," I was smiling.

To me, he meant the holidays, mercifully, had passed.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.