Those Holidays
This past
weekend I’m driving around performing some of my routine
housekeeping chores when I am struck dumbfounded by the
sight of Christmas decorations already in place at one of
the local malls close to my house.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I suspect the majority of
us are just looking for a few weeks of peace and quiet after
having been subjected to almost a full year of election
diatribe by all forms of the news media. This year it seemed
to occupy our collective minds to the point where most of us
were little more than zombies on Election Day. We stumbled
our ways into the booths with one thought on our
minds….’must get this finished.’ Our state was fortunate in
some regard since the outcome here was never in doubt. Some
voters in the so called ‘swing states’ had non stop radio
and television advertising and up to twenty pieces of
campaign literature sent to them each day. God save us all.
So, here we are fresh from the polling booths, ready to
settle down for a few weeks of relative calm before the
storm of the holidays and what happens? Why, they move the
holidays up so they start advertising earlier. I’m brain
dead after Labor Day, Halloween, National Elections…now we
go directly to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year…. give
me a break…. I bet there are folks in prison having more fun
than we are.
This morning’s paper blares a headline…”Only seven weeks
until Christmas.” Seven weeks? That’s just around the
corner. No time to waste, no time to dawdle, certainly no
time to rest. We’ve got to drag our old weary bodies out
into the malls and start the holiday process over again. I’m
not finished with July 4th and Labor Day. I’m not ready for
garland and ribbons and stringing lights on the balcony,
much less trying to find the one bulb in the string of
lights that causes the entire string to short out.
Pray tell me this. We have put men on the moon. We have sent
rockets to Mars and the outermost parts of our solar system.
Why can’t we have a string of lights that work even if one
bulb doesn’t cooperate? I truthfully believe this is a major
conspiracy on the part of the Christmas light association to
deprive us, no better yet disenfranchise (have you heard
this word more than you want?) us for the enjoyment of
Christmas. I despise, I hate, I loathe dragging those boxes
out of the attic each and every year to sit down and spend
hours untangling only to find that the thousands of bulbs
absolutely refuse to glow simply because one bulb is on the
fritz. What kind of a world is this we live in?
I feel certain as I sit here and write this article,
somewhere in this country men are hard at work cutting down
little trees and arranging them in huge stacks to be sent to
the far corners of this country within the next few weeks.
There they will be stood up and arranged on thousands of
small lots waiting for the next sucker like me to come along
and pay good money for one before they are sold out. The
tradition then states that we drive this two-month-old dead
piece of shrubbery into our living rooms where we stick it
into a bucket of water and somehow expect it to revive. At
the same time we are clogging our collective vacuums with
pine needles trying to stay ahead of a losing game. The same
mentality requires us to keep each and every Christmas
ornament made by any of our children or their children and
sometimes the children of neighbors until the end of time.
Some of my children’s earlier creations are somewhat
abstract and require a certain amount of license to even
consider that they were actually made by a human being. Only
the Mother knows for certain that her child made this one
and was his first attempt using glue, glitter, tissue paper
and a clothespin. How she can see the Virgin Mary in this is
simply beyond my ability, but then again perhaps I am being
entirely too critical.
An old poem once had the line in it…”Ours is not to reason
why….” Can it be that this must be the attitude we have to
adopt when it comes to our annual activities? As sure as the
elections roll around, so does Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Perhaps I should quit fighting it every year and just get
into the mood before it’s too late and I have to think about
Valentines Day.
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