What does it mean to wish a happy new year to someone whose new year will be exactly like the old one -- facing prison walls? The question stretches the conventional language of the holiday season according to PNS commentator Joe Loya, who has been on both sides of those walls. Loya, an associate editor at PNS, spent seven years in federal prison on bank robbery charges and is writing an autobiography.

This is my third holiday season out of prison. Trash cans are overflowing with Christmas wrappings, the children's new game sets are bleeping, and there is too much leftover eggnog again.

I wish my friends in prison could be free like me.

Four of them sent me cards for the holidays. I didn't know what to write in cards I sent to them. How could I scribble "Merry Christmas" or "Happy New Year" -- but that's what they wrote to me and I don't want to throw their cards away. I don't want to forget the people who sent the cards.

In prison, the holidays have all the stress usual to this time of the year, but almost none of the accompanying joy. St. Thomas Aquinas said that the greatest punishment in hell would be the pain of loss.

It's that sense of unchangeable loss that prisoners feel at the end of the year. I used to go to sleep at 10:00 p.m. on New Year's Eve. No pomp and ceremony for me. I couldn't stand the feeling of being left out.

Tensions are high during the holidays in prison. Only the long hot days of midsummer can contribute more to the alchemy of violence. At year's end more prisoners use the phones. Some to share season's cheer with their children, others to check up on their women to make sure they aren't partying too hard.

Whatever the reason, more prisoners on the phones means more men learning that family and friends are having fun in their absence. So the telephone creates brooding men.

There are some highlights at holiday time. The prison chaplain generally distributes two free greeting cards, for Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years, to anyone willing to go to the chapel and pick them up. And Christmas dinner always added a touch of the season's spirit -- two green and red mints, or a little plastic cup of salted peanuts on the side.

I never heard of one prisoner donating money to the favorite charity of another prisoner, but I've know prisoners to donate $1 to $20 to a fund for a poor child who needs expensive surgery.

In prison, the best gifts I ever received from fellow prisoners were things like bars of soap, a brand new pair of socks or a Snickers bar with a bag of coffee.

Although my habits now conform quite nicely with the free world, I still wake up at 5:00 a.m. sometimes and remember one birthday in prison when I found a bag of Tang underneath my pillow while I was preparing my bunk for sleep. Or the time when I gave a money-less friend a $6.00 carton of generic cigarettes for Christmas and he acted like I'd given him a years supply of clean underwear.

The irony of Christmas goodwill in prison is that, to limit extortion, inmates are not allowed to exchange property, so giving something of value to another inmate -- like a pair of socks or bag of coffee -- is a violation that can be punished with the taking away of good time credits.

And while it is hard for me to wish my friends in prison a Happy this or Merry that, at holiday time, friends greet each other with the appropriate salutation. I laughed the first time a friend wished me Happy New Year. I still had five years to serve.

My friend Jimmy was imprisoned more than 20 years when I met him. But that never diminished his sense of humor. In the morning he'd wake up, look in the mirror and proclaim out loud, "I can't wait for tomorrow because I get better looking everyday."

I feel the pain of loss for not being with my imprisoned friends. I hold in my hands their words of cheer and I realize that I can't find the words to match theirs.