It's Christmas!

It’s Christmas again! In spite of the decorations and music that begins nowadays long before Thanksgiving I try not to notice. But when Linda wants a tree there is no way to pretend any longer. Today was that day. Interestingly enough, although we live in an area in which virtually every other person raises Christmas trees, there are few to be found for sale. Only two places this year have trees for sale. We looked carefully. It appears that the tree salesmen this year believe everyone has a home with huge cathedral ceilings as the smallest tree we were shown was somewhere in the fifteen to twenty foot tall range. One of the salesmen did allow as to how he had his chain saw right there and would cut enough off to make it a normal sized tree – but it would still cost the same. It wasn’t the cost that put us off, however, just that all the trees were wrapped so you had no idea what they actually looked like. This is when Linda decided that we could find our own tree somewhere on our six acres. I suggested politely that it was very difficult to find a suitable tree in nature but she was not to be put off. So now we have this strange looking spindly little tree with few but very long branches. Even decorated it looks like starvation personified. But we are proud. It is, after all, our tree. And it is Christmas. And our son is on his way home.

When Linda put on the Christmas music for the first time this year I remarked, innocently enough I thought, “we just had Christmas music last year.” She did not find this amusing. But think of it, after 75 years of listening to the same rather dreadful tunes over and over and over again, isn’t it understandable that one might have had enough. They should allow the standard Christmas carols to be sung only once a year, that’s it. Once. That would be quite enough. As far as the rest of what passes for Christmas music goes, we’d probably be better off if it was not allowed at all. Who wants to listen to Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer twenty thousand times each December. Or Jingle Bells, for that matter. Of course when it comes to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” what more needs to be said? Or how about that other really Christmas favorite, “All I want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth?” This is in the same league with “Drop Kick me Jesus Through the Goal Post of Life,” except that this latter is not very Christmas-like. Maybe it could be adapted?

We were planning a Christmas dinner for Saturday but one couple couldn’t attend then because, as the husband observed, “I have to take my wife to the cathedrals of consumerism that day." I don’t know if he made that line up himself or if he heard it elsewhere but it certainly sums things up.

There is a big fuss being made at the moment over the fact that the phrase Merry Christmas is being significantly replaced by Happy Holidays. Some Christians seem to think that Happy Holidays does not do justice to the fact that it is Christ’s birthday and is really a sop to other religions which are not Christian (like the hundreds of religions in the U.S. that are not Christian, to say nothing of we atheists). Ha ha ha, as if Christmas in the U.S. has anything whatsoever to do with religion or Christ’s birthday. Christmas, as it is currently practiced in the U.S., is no more than a purely secular commercially driven madness that occurs November through January and involves shameless and conspicuous consumption. Indeed, many of the most religious people we know don’t observe the holiday because it is basically pagan. Think of the absurdity of millions of people each year in December killing a perfectly healthy growing tree, dragging it in the house and hanging it with lights and assorted goo-gahs, only to then deposit it in the local dump. But whee! Its Christmas! Sorry, Happy Holidays.