Now its easy to make fun of millennials. They tend toward self-parody with their tattoos, manbuns, complicated coffee orders, fussy beer, over reliance on data, and gender-benderism.

Christmas gift giving is a chore.

You get what you think is right for people, but there are mistakes. A few Christmases ago, a friend got his wife a new upright vacuum cleaner. He posted a pic of the machine on Facebook prior to wrapping. A woman commented, Unless that thing has a diamond bracelet wrapped around the handle, dont do it!

Theyre still together, so I guess it worked out.

The best are the gifts that are instantly loved. That streak of joy that crosses their face when they open and realize what it is. Nothing like it. Youre just as happy, too. And you learn again that its the giving not the receiving that matters more.

And thats my problem this year. Theres a person Id like to get a gift for, a gift that would bring something missing in their life, which is joy. Actually, its not just one person, but a whole generation, the millennials. They are the Americans who turned 23-38 this year. All year Ive read about them. Its usually bad press. They are, according to reports and surveys and studies, the most unhappy of the living generations of Americas.

Now its easy to make fun of them. They tend toward self parody with their tattoos, manbuns, complicated coffee orders, fussy beer, over reliance on data, and gender-benderism.

Even my own kids and their teenage friends, who will soon replace the millennials (Gen Z or zoomers as they call themselves) make fun of millennials and their college debt and in-your-face political correctness.

America is a bubbling cauldron of racism, sexism, homophobia and other intractable social pathologies that requires heavy-handed social media tactics and government policies to correct. The future is dystopian, where CO2 leaves Mother Earth a Wall-E world denuded of green, where the oceans rise and life withers. Man, thats bleak.

It is no wonder that millennials figure prominently in Americas deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses and other addictions. Two weeks ago, a business journal took a look at the state of millennial well-being and published it under this headline Lonely, burned out and depressed: The state of millennials mental health entering the 2020s.

Egad.

As I close in on 60, Im at a loss to explain the generational malaise.

I was born at the end of the baby boom, during the Camelot Era. Optimism was in the air. You breathed it as you grew up. Not that there werent bad things to feel depressed and angry about Vietnam, Nixon, gas rioting, a lot of other stuff, too. We had Klan rolling around Bucks County back then.

But the Big One was the Cold War, what Kennedy called our long twilight struggle between good and evil. (God-fearing America good, godless commie USSR evil.)

It hung over us 24/7. We on the East Coast knew wed be vaporized in a nuclear battle. The worst secret in Levittown was the Nike missile base off Route 413. In World War III, those nukes would rise from their silos and blast off toward the USSR. Our outgoing missiles would pass their incoming, and then our world would end. It was called MAD mutual assured destruction. Afterward, The living would envy the dead, it was said.

As kids we learned this in school, along with our numbers and colors and letters of the alphabet. But we didnt let it get to us, or conquer us. Im not sure why. Maybe it was that wonderful American optimism. Or maybe it was the music, rock and roll. You cant underestimate it. Rock music changed attitudes and emotions faster than any illicit drug. Maybe thats why it was so popular. It bards were taken more seriously than any network anchor, pundit, college professor, public intellectual or socialist socialists considered cranks in those days.

Top 40 radio, prehistoric compared to todays digital streaming services, provided the joyful cultural oxygen breathed by young Americans, maybe more than its credited.

The other night, I came across an old holiday video produced in 1983 for MTV. Its the obscure Rock and Roll Christmas by George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Its a fast, hard rock, blues and boogie tune, which was Thorogoods signature. Its done live, and the set is packed with kids dancing, some badly, but all having a great time, which is all that matters when youre rocking.

Thorogood was from Delaware, and he and bands like his were popular in the Philadelphia area at that time. Watching that video is how I remember it being back then out with friends, dancing with girls we didnt know, rocking til close. And everyone had plans, more or less. Everyone was figuring it out. Christmas was bright. The future was bright. You could see how happy this made your parents, too, that you were having a good time and had plans and were on your way.

I wish I could wrap that rock energy and optimism and fun and give it to the millennials this Christmas, and every Christmas until that joy comes, and despair vanishes.

JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.

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Mullane: A rock and roll Christmas this year and every year - Waynesboro Record Herald