People who don't like to read my essays have my permission to skip this. Don't go saying I forced you. You won't hurt my feelings--honest!
Every year, about this time, it's hard to believe it's Christmas. It's a yearly ritual (i.e., being surprised that it's Christmas already). It's as if, as a species, we were not genetically predisposed to believing that it's Christmas already.
And there's the yearly ritual of not believing how early the Christmas displays and the Christmas music are coming out in the malls, on TV, on radio, etc. ("They're playing Christmas songs already?") This is invariably followed by Dickens- and Schultz-style complaining about the commercializing of Christmas, a process which presumably is still going on after Scrooge denounced the holiday in so many terms (by way of excusing his cold Yuletide heart). Those commercializers need to get their act together if it's been that long and they're STILL working on the plasticizing of Dec. 25.
Then there's the being-embarrassed-to-admit-that-you-have-a-favorite-Christmas-song ritual. "Sure, this is dreck/kitsch/fluff/garbage, but I heard it as a kid, so I'm excused." The implication being, of course, that our regular musical diet does NOT consist of dreck/kitsch/fluff/garbage, but, rather, great art music like Beck, Johnny Cash, Esquivel, Boxcar Willie, or The Stones.
Unlike Thanksgiving, which Boomers and their imitators trash at will as a horrible and disgusting middle-class ritual, Christmas is fairly free from such attacks, mainly because the attackers don't have the guts to trash it. NOBODY touches Christmas. Christ himself? No problem. Expect fifty or so essays explaining that Christ has nothing to do with CHRISTmas, and vice versa. For the few people who read those things.
And expect some messing around with the history of the holiday. We'll learn that the Pilgrims used Dec. 25 to consume their young, and that Christmas trees were originally Christmas tepees--hence, their conical shape. Don't laugh--I just learned, via an essay being plagiarized across the 'Net, that the same awful folks were having numerous "Thanksgivings" a year (one for each time they wiped out an Indian tribe) until George Washington (!) called a halt to the practice, insisting that only one Thanksgiving be held annually. I never knew that George was around (let alone was exercising any authority) in the seventeenth century, but what do I know about anything.
And some atheists will remind us (in "Did you know..."? fashion) that Christmas is just another winter solstice celebration. Which is nice to know. For the zillionth time.
As for faith-bashing activities of the richard dawkins type, who knows what those will be or how noisy? I suspect we'll see the usual gripes about Nativity scenes and read a few low-key church/state-separation essays, but no major pop-cultural wars are on the horizon. The idiots to the right and left of the "God issue," whose job it is to feed each other's complaints, will do as they always do and use the days up to and including Thanksgiving to bitch about stuff. And they'll cower from Christmas. People are usually afraid of that (or those) which they trash, and middle-class-bashers are no different. You don't want to rile everyday folks during the loudest and busiest of all vernacular celebrations.
At this blog, where pop culture rules, the middle class is treated as what it is--the majority. A proud and noble majority. The middle class is us. Pop culture is ours. The culture that surrounds, informs, consumes, and makes us what we are (?) has somehow become something remote--something to do with kitsch or camp or (if you stick around Huff-Po) the "unwashed masses." It's as if nothing were worse than the cultural middle-ground. What we're looking at is an attitude that used to exist solely among the elite--an anti-masses attitude that has somehow become the attitude OF the masses.
Note, when you have a moment, how often we apologize for average, everyday things. Notice that I never devote so much as a nanosecond to that ritual at this place, unless I'm criticizing it.
The hardest things to see clearly are, invariably, the closest. While I participate, to some extent, with the ritual of treating Christmas as something novel or campy or silly, I'm not totally comfortable with it. Christmas, after all, is a celebration of the most vital and needful things in life--family, shelter, food, and the spirit of charity, to name four. And, if you're an "xian" like me (don't you love that reduction?), you might see it in terms of a Savior--a soul liberator--born in the most squalid of circumstances. Last year, I wrote that the tragedy and majesty of Christ's birth were one and the same. To me, that's the message of Christmas.
But that's me. Anyway, my yearly, without-apology embrace of all things gloriously ordinary begins with the next post, which will contain a bunch of music. (Or a link to same.)
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings, Happy Solstice, whatever.
Lee
