A friend recently posed a question online about how many of his friends and acquaintances who read that blog enjoyed the holidays. I first responded with a simple, “Do I really need to answer this?” because I figured that he knows me well enough to know how crazy I go with Christmas decorations and such.
I saw only a couple of other replies before one mutual acquaintance posted that he doesn’t like holidays, and has often wondered if the “joyful people” are brain-damaged or perhaps have butlers to handle all the stressful tasks.
Our tree this year, the theme is Cartoon Characters.Today is the eleventh day of Christmas. Christmas starts, traditionally, at sunset on Christmas Eve, you see. Most of us don’t think of it that way. A lot of people in the U.S., myself included, tend to think of the start of Christmas Season as beginning the day after Thanksgiving. So by the time Christmas Day arrives, we’ve been decorating and celebrating for at least four weeks.
So I understand why some people are tired of it all by Boxing Day.
It feels like people are more impatient to end it than they used to be, and a friend had an interesting theory about that… Continue reading The eleventh day→
Having a bad day?It’s been a while since I heard the old myth, so I was a little surprised when a detective show I watch had the medical examiner character refer to Christmas as “Suicide Season.” That myth (based on the notions that the cheerfulness {forced or otherwise} of the holidays the makes depressed people more starkly aware of their situation) and the associated one that the stress of the holidays literal drives people crazy, have both been debunked by numerous studies.
It’s not just that suicide rates don’t go up, nor merely that psychiatric admissions don’t go up. The studies show that suicide rates actually go down at each major holiday, and that psychiatric admissions reach their lowest point in the weeks immediately before Christmas.
Happy Christmas! Blessed Yul! Happy Hogswatch! Joyous Kwanza! Festive Festivus! Feliz Navidad! God Jul! Mele Kalikimaka me ka Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou! Beannachtaí na Nollag! Buon Natale! Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus un laimīgu Jauno gadu! Felix Dies Nativitatus! …and bless us, every one!
A tiger cub in a Santa Suit (from Emergency Kittens)!I find it alternately confusing and amusing that some of the most emphatic defenders of keeping the Christ in Christmas want to claim Santa Claus as an important component of the Christian aspect of the holiday. Because among the fundamentalist Christians who raised me, Santa Claus was always a symbol of the secularization of the holiday. Several of the churches I attended as a kid banned images of Santa Claus from the building, and forbade the singing of any of the Christmas songs that mentioned him at any church activity.
I say churches, plural, because my family moved often during my childhood. My dad’s job in the petroleum industry leading to my oft-repeated description of growing up as “ten elementary schools in four different states.”
I remember, for instance, the “Up On the House Top” controversy. One of the churches ran a nonprofit day care on weekdays. While it was a church day care, it was a business open to any family that could pay the fees, so a lot of the kids came from families that attended different churches (or no church at all). One year of the day care’s annual Christmas pageant, in addition to the usual repertoire of “Silent Night,” “O, Little Town of Bethleham,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” “Away in the Manger,” “Joy to the World,” and “Jingle Bells,” one group of kids sang a version of “Up on the House Top” that included some amusing choreography.
Some of the church ladies who were not regularly associated with the day care attended the pageant, and they were not pleased. It started running around the gossip circuit in the congregation that someone had allowed Santa Claus at the day care. The tone of voice some people used, you would have thought that someone was giving the kids alcohol and cigarettes. Or even worse, allowing them to listen to rock music!
To me, I didn’t see how it was that much different than “Jingle Bells,” which is a Christmas song that doesn’t mention Jesus’ birth at all. No one ever seemed to object to that in the children’s performance. And I recall a very amusing rendition of “I’m Gettin’ Nothin’ for Christmas” at an evening Christmas concert at church that no one objected to. Not every song performed at the less formal holiday events at the church had to be a sacred hymn, obviously.
Why are flying reindeer less confusing than people who belief differently than you?I realize that a lot of the people who believe that the War on Christmas is an actual thing are not necessarily hardcore Biblical literalist or fundamentalists. They’re a bit more casually Christian. They are the sorts of people who think that the phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness” actually comes from the Bible, right? They’re also the ones who can say, with a straight face, “Jesus promoted charity at the highest level, but he was not self-destructive. The Lord helps those who help themselves.”
And I get that Santa Claus gets his name from American ears hearing Dutch immigrants refer to Saint Nicholas (“Sinterklaas”) back in the 19th Century. And therefore to them Santa Claus is sort of an alias for the 4th Century Christian Bishop. But the red-suited man driving a sleigh pulled by magic reindeer and filling stockings with toys is not a Biblical character. He’s very much a secular figure.
And I’m looking forward to his visit at our house soon! Our stockings are up, our tree lights will be left on all night. I’m not sure whether we’ll be leaving him eggnog and cookies this year or if it might be sherry and pork pies. But, this liberal taoist gay man and his liberal wiccan bi husband are looking forward to tracking Santa on our computers and phones with the Norad app, watching some silly Christmas shows featuring such important Christmas characters as the Grinch, a red-nosed reindeer, and ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. And I can’t wait to see what Santa leaves in my stocking this year!
No matter what holiday you celebrate, I’d like to wish a merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
A tiger cub in a Santa Suit (from Emergency Kittens)!My vague plan for Sunday was to pack up & check out of the hotel, watch the Seahawks game, watch some of my Christmas movies, and get some housework done. Of course, I hadn’t discussed specifics with Michael. So we were eating brunch at a place we stopped at on the way home when all the plans started falling apart.
He needed to pick up some presents to give to his co-workers at their party. On the other hand, he hadn’t slept well at the hotel and really wanted a nap. So he suggested taking a nap while I watched the game, then we could go shopping. I had a sinus headache, and as we talked, realized that my throat felt a bit wrong. So I was worried I might be coming down with a cold…Continue reading Shambling toward Christmas Eve→
Thinking about the Christmases past.When my late husband, Ray, was still alive, every December we would acquire a number of bags of various Holiday Blends of coffee beans. It started out simple enough, I like Starbucks’ holiday blend, one of whose components are aged Sumatran beans, but Ray wasn’t a big fan, as he didn’t like dark roasted coffees. So he would pick up a bag of “Jingle Java” which was the Safeway store brand’s holiday coffee.
This escalated over time, as one or the other of us would find other companies offering some kind of holiday or christmas blend of beans while we were shopping. Some years we would wind up with a half dozen or more bags of different holiday blends…
Time to put up the lights!Once again this year we didn’t get much of our decorating done during the long Thanksgiving weekend. Some of the blame goes to me trying to finish my novel by the end of the month for my Alternate NaNoWriMo. Part of the blames goes to the fact that we drove down to Mom’s the night before Thanksgiving and drove home Thanksgiving night itself, so we both slept in more than a bit longer than usual on the day after Thanksgiving.
And part of the blame goes to me having a really awful sinus headache on Sunday.
Big national chains that are opening on Thanksgiving and making their employees come in on the holiday,
And the chains that are remaining closed the entire holiday.
I wound up in a chat online this week about the phenomenon. I have always felt a little guilty because my entire adult life I’ve had jobs where we get both Thanksgiving and the day after off as paid holidays. Meanwhile, my mom worked retail and always had to work either Thanksgiving Day or Christmas (a few years both). And each serious relationship I’ve been in, my partner has either had to work the holiday or at least both the day before and the day after.
And for the last many years, visiting my mom for the holidays has required us to rent a hotel room. Mom’s previous two living places where so small, the entire place would have fit inside our living room. When she was still living in Vancouver, that also meant that if my sister and her kids were there, they were all sleeping at Mom’s place, where there was no guest room.
Anyway, that means I also feel guilty about the people at the hotel who have to work that day, in part, because of me.
I still feel bad about the times I’ve had to run to a store on a major holiday. Though I must admit, the year that all of the sinks clogged up while I was in the middle of cooking (first Thanksgiving after Ray & I moved into the place, first time his mom had come to have a holiday dinner with us, and all of my sinks clogged!), that when I showed up in the checkout line with multiple bottles of drain opener and a plunger as my only items, the cashier laughed, and then said, “Thank you for making me feel like working this shift was worth it.”
Anyway, there are the lists, if you want to boycott or just send a letter to the folks in charge. I’m really hoping that they have so few people show up to shop that they don’t do it next year.
A friend recently posed a question online about how many of his friends and acquaintances who read that blog enjoyed the holidays. I first responded with a simple, “Do I really need to answer this?” because I figured that he knows me well enough to know how crazy I go with Christmas decorations and such.
Font Folly 