Do you hear what I hear?

The holidays, continued.

Amazing isn’t it? This little season from Thanksgiving ‘til December 25th (Christmas, if you will) has its very own segment of the entertainment industry. The music alone is staggering. In an industry that has been suffering for several years this little season can still generate big piles of cash. Just about everyone manages to eek out a holiday song or re-make a well-known holiday song and someone will buy it. I admit that I am a blatant holiday music whore. I’ll listen to it all no matter how cringe-worthy; matter of fact the more cringe-worthy the better.

There are touching songs and raunchy songs and funny songs. There are songs about snow and songs about no snow. Songs about love and joy and Santa and toys. Certainly there are songs associated with other seasons. Sure there are songs we hear that make us think of a particular Summer, but Summer songs aren’t really specific to Summer, they’re just songs that happen to get played a lot during a particular Summer. They don’t even come back around every year they just fade away from a current song to a heritage classic and then a golden oldie.

Not Christmas tunes though, nope. They come back around every single year with a few (hundred) to add to the heap. Let’s face it, that Bing Crosby version of White Christmas sounds as good today as it did when ol’ Der Bingle was still alive and being a crappy father and husband while putting on the image of the all ‘round great guy.

Speaking of snow…we were speaking snow, right? Notice that most or many of the holiday songs are focused on something to do with snow? All that hearkens back to the origins of the Yule season up in those Nordic and Germanic countries where snow in December and January would be pretty common. Basically holiday music disregards anyone living south of the snow line as well as south of the equator . Good ol’ Santa in his many guises is definitely dressed for some wintery weather. You don’t see Santa in a nice pair of cargo shorts and a Summer shirt. Snow, it’s all about snow. It’s about building snowmen and riding in horse drawn sleighs over the river and through the woods.

So yeah, there’s an entire sub-music industry built around one day of the year and a season that spans no more than four weeks. It’s shocking, fun in many ways but shocking that so much (mostly bad) music can come out of this season.

I admit that I have a huge collection of holiday music but I’ve kinda slacked off in recent years, I think the redundancy of it all made me lapse into bored apathy.

Holiday movies and specials are another sub-industry unique to this season. There aren’t nearly as many holiday specials on TV as there were when I was a kid. When I was a kid there were tons of variety show style holiday specials. Andy Williams had one, The Smothers Brothers, Bing Crosby used to ALWAYS have a holiday special, that’s where that awesome version of Little Drummer Boy with David Bowie came from. Now holiday TV programming is more along the lines of truly awful holiday movies primarily focused on a variation of “A Christmas Carol”. To mix things up a little there are the standard tearjerkers with touching endings; single moms who meet the love of their life where they least expect it or families reunited by the magic of the Christmas spirit.

Just like with the music, the TV shows are completely unrealistic and inappropriate at any other time of year. No one would believe that you could handcuff a guy you were waiting on in a luncheonette and end up marrying him by the end of the two hour movie (“Holiday in Handcuffs” complete with Mario Lopez AND his dimples) but in this season clearly ANYTHING is possible. I can’t get enough. It makes Saturday and Sunday afternoon movies the rest of the year pale by comparison.

Have ya noticed that they seem to recycle the same actors through most of the awful holiday flicks? There’s a crop of actors and actresses, C, maybe D listers who seem to show up over and over again in the same roles with different names and backdrops. It’s usually actors on their way back down the food chain, hey at least they’re working as actors and not waiting tables (I suppose).

When I was young television choices were limited to the major networks and a few peripheral channels so it did limit the outlets for holiday programming. With cable and satellite TV those limits have been blown out of the water. Now there are food and style networks that have their very own special holiday offerings with their very own level of awesomeness. The Food Network has all kinds of tips and tricks for holiday foods offering hours of overeating inspiring programming. HGTV and Style offer ways to dress up yourself or your home to reflect those fabulous holiday myths celebrated between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

By now you must be wondering if I’m for or against this glut of weirdly bad entertainment options four weeks at the end of every year. I’ll end that speculation right now. LOVE THEM. Of course the only reason I love them is because they are weirdly bad and maybe even because they are a tad out of reach. You’re usually not treated to a heavy dose of Christmas movies in March so just the fact that I have to wait for them makes them just that much more desirable.

Now, back to watching some holiday decorating tips on HGTV.

It’s the MOST … time of the year.

Warning: This may be a multi-part post…or not.

Disclaimer: As with everything on this blog, the views expressed here are my own if you disagree that’s fine, just like its fine for these thoughts and opinions to be mine.

There’s no denying that it’s officially the holiday season here in the USA. It’s been creeping up on us for months but now the full court press is on. Nearly every commercial is holiday themed; wait, why am I saying holiday themed? Nothing is “HOLIDAY” themed, they are all CHRISTMAS themed.

The American Atheists Organization(http://atheists.org/atheism/Christmas) put up a billboard outside the Lincoln Tunnel, the major entry to New York City from New Jersey. It went up the day before Thanksgiving, the “official” holiday, ummm, Christmas season kick-off. The image is a familiar one, three wise men guided by a star to a nativity scene, the message is much different, “You KNOW it’s a Myth, this season, celebrate reason”. I admit that I haven’t heard much press about this just yet but I can’t imagine it will exist there without scandal for the next four weeks. If it does then there are more reasonable people out there than I’ve thought possible. For years I’ve been inundated with billboards and bumper stickers telling us to “Put Christ back in Christmas” which is really far more offensive than what the American Atheists are putting out there.

Christians had to put Christ into Christmas in the first place. Yule or Yuletide (sorry, I just took a break to do a holiday movie trivia quiz online) was a celebration in the northern hemisphere with some pagan and cultural roots. There’re plenty of sources for info about the various traditions out there on the internet and because this isn’t a scholarly paper I’m not gonna hunt down references, you’ll just have to take my word for it and do your own damn research.

Yuletide was a big ol’ feast. The countries that celebrated it, places like Norway, Sweden and other cold places up north killed the necessary livestock for their winter meals and generally partied hard to get through their harsh and DARK winters. Evergreen trees were common in the forests of the Nordic and Germanic countries and so was darkness. That said, you’ve got forests of trees that never lose their greenery in winter and you have something that can symbolize endless life and re-birth…not necessarily the physical re-birth of a religious savior but the re-birth of more basic stuff…like plants which happens in the spring and plants equal food which equals LIFE. So if you light up those evergreen trees with some candles you bring light to the darkness (I’ve been up in those countries…it is DARK this time of year) combined you have a symbol that life will eventually return to the earth in the form of spring and also light will return as the seasons change. Now all you Christian folks are welcome to co-opt that stuff for your own needs but let’s not tout putting Christ BACK in Christmas because I’ll be responding by saying let’s put Yule back in ol’ Yuletide.

The twelve days of Christmas, that would be December 25th to January 6th, oh yes it is. I did my research on this many years ago because my birthday happens to be twelve days before Christmas and people would make a point of telling me I was the first gift of the twelve days of Christmas, I had to know so I looked it up (long before the days of the internet I might add). They were wrong. Yule straddles the end of December and the beginning of January and the festival would last twelve days generally the darkest days of the year. Again our Christian buddies liked it so they decided to attach their own meaning to it, January 6th is often referred to as Little Christmas or Epiphany. The myth is something about it being the day the Magi reached the baby Jesus in the manger which works quite nicely to marry up Christian myth with pagan traditions and end all that overeating and overdrinking and hunker down to get through the remainder of the cold, dark winter months.

You get the picture, Christianity was spreading but they needed to sell themselves to the masses and the best way to do it was to glom onto an existing celebration.

Flash forward lo these many years and the whole mess has turned into, well, a whole mess. I have to wonder if those ol’ Yule feasts were also fraught with family drama the way today’s are. They must’ve been, right? I mean nothing says family drama like downing a few too many pints of mead?

A recent article I accessed through CNN.com bashed Christmas TV ads like Lexus and DeBeers because of the sheer extravagance of it all. I don’t know a single person in my half century + on planet earth that has ever walked outside Christmas morning to see a shiny new luxury car in their driveway with a big red bow on top. I don’t even know someone that has walked outside to see a used Chevy in their driveway on Christmas morning no less a friggin’ Lexus but there it is, every year, this ridiculous commercial put out there to make all other gifts seem pale and inadequate. I don’t even know what I’d do if I walked out and saw a new Lexus in my driveway. Honestly, if we had enough money to do that wouldn’t I want to go with hubby and pick it out myself?

The DeBeers diamond commercial was also specifically razzed and as one of the commenters pointed out, getting engaged on Christmas is NOT all that original of an idea so DeBeers is just pushing the buttons on the least creative members of the male population. Kay Jewelers can get lumped in there for the same lack of originality. I saw a commercial just last night for some other diamond ring that was a specific style, an endless knot or something like that. Now here’s my thoughts on that…do you really want an engagement ring that anyone else could also have? Seriously, don’t you want your engagement ring to show some small degree of originality and not be a mass-produced style from a chain jewelry store?

The Folgers coffee commercials make me crazy (and not in a good way). To be honest that sister and brother creep me out a bit if ya know what I mean. She’s just a tad too excited to see him and she greets him in that weird way, “SISTAH?” I don’t get it, she’s the sister, is she reminding him who she is? She says it in this weird questioning way that is just odd. I also don’t know why the brother is traveling from West Africa, where did they get THAT from? Were they just trying to find some faraway exotic place to toss into the commercial?

Any commercial with the lovely Budweiser Clydesdales works for me. Love to see them prancing through fields of snow with the jolly sound of jingle bells in the background. I never get tired of seeing those. I’m not sure I understand the Tommy Hilfiger commercials and I don’t think they even advertise most of the year except for Christmas but there they are bounding out of some artsy-sporty vehicle in a field somewhere dressed in artsy-sporty Hilfiger clothes, pointless.

I can’t call this anything other than the Christmas season…not because I want it that way but because the commercials I’m talking about either flat out pander to Christmas or they imply Christmas so strongly that it’d be foolish of me to pretend that they’re holiday commercials. There are the Pillsbury commercials with the slice and bake Christmas cookies or the crescent rolls, there are the 3M commercials for the various tape and wrapping products. I have to give 3M credit for doing really excellent line extensions for their products. They now have a little tape dispenser that goes on your wrist and doles out precut pieces of tape to make gift wrapping easier, NEAT. They have those hanger things that are temporary and don’t leave marks on your walls, doors or mantels, again, NEAT. They have found a way to take some truly boring products and made them into something pretty useful to serve Christmas decorating needs. Kudos to their development and marketing departments (seriously, no sarcasm here, I love what they’ve done with their product line).

I’ve touched on the American Atheists (and in case you were in any way confused…I’m 100% in favor of what they’ve done with that billboard), they tout reason and they actually seem to mean it. Here’s how I feel, if you derive some sense of comfort or community by believing in a specific deity and worshiping something in a specific way then I say “go for it” with the caveat to not bother me with it. Don’t try to make me follow what you believe and please be kind and respectful to me and others who choose not to believe what you believe.

Now that I’ve put that out there I have to say that there are definitely some serious extremists who just won’t do that, who won’t play nice in this big ol’ sandbox known as earth. The American Family Association is one of them (http://action.afa.net/ ). They compiled a list of “naughty or nice” retailers, what, you may be wondering makes them naughty or nice? I was surprised to find out that what made a retailer naughty or nice was whether they said "Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”! Really? How FUCKING INTOLERANT; how completely EXclusionary. They think that if they have a holiday shop with ornaments and other decorations that it MUST be called a Christmas shop not a holiday shop! Why? What if they include in that area some Mennorahs and dreidls? What if you celebrate yuletide and put up a tree and decorations in honor of that? Nope according to the AFA it’s Christmas and nothing else. It’s because of folks like this that my Atheist buddies (of which I would say I am one) feel compelled to put up a billboard outside the Lincoln Tunnel pointing out that IT’S A MYTH. It may be a lovely myth. It may bring comfort and joy to millions of people, I get that. But please, please, please don’t shove your myth down my throat along with the turkey and cranberry sauce. Hell, Harry Potter is a myth too but the books are a lot easier to read.

NEXT UP: Holiday entertainment

Lit

It creeps up on little kitten paws. You don’t really see it at first. One minute it’s Halloween. There’s faux tableaus of haunted houses and fake cobwebs stretched over shrubs. I don’t really know why anyone needs fake ones…we have plenty of real cobwebs but they aren’t as dense and lush as the fake ones.

October 31st comes and goes. The haunted houses slowly fade away just as the light fades to a protracted night. Pumpkins go from tight, leering grins to rotting pouts reminiscent of old men without their dentures.

Driving home in the dark you start to notice a colored strand of light wound around a stair banister. Then there’s a bush or two draped in soft white lights. Before you know it the winter holidays are in full swing. Santa is bouncing on a front lawn. Faux icicles dangle from the eaves of a McMansion. A menorah graces a window ledge with blue light bulbs marking off the days.

The holidays seem to wind up slowly but steadily now. There’s an artful way of dragging out the season that escalates as it looms large and grows closer.
You’ll be getting ready for work one morning with a slight chill in the air and see a TV commercial hinting at colder days and holiday gifts. Nothing blatant yet; no C’mas tree in the picture, maybe some kids in feet-y jammies or a mom making hot chocolate. Hints, of what’s on the horizon. You know it’s there. You know the season is right within reach but not quite there yet.

There’s only 55 days between Halloween and Christmas. There are usually about 100 days or so between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Fifty-five days isn’t really very long when you think about it. When you’re a little kid those 55 days are endlessly long but as an adult it doesn’t seem long at all. A lot of people bemoan the sight of their first string of holiday lights after Halloween complaining that there’s plenty of time for that…but is there? Just 55 days.

I admit. I’m not a fan of the holidays. I’m a Summer chick m’self. If anything I’m looking to countdown for it to all be over. Despite that I admit to being fascinated by the ritual associated with the entire season. I know that every night as I drive home I’ll see yet another home lit up for the holidays. Suddenly there will be a giant bouncing Santa on a lawn or a white-lit reindeer tableau. I saw the local Jewish center assembling the community menorah in the dark last night on my way home from work.

Despite whatever anyone may think we’re really doing this to brighten these suddenly dark and dreary days. In the Spring and Summer I’d never notice driving through neighborhoods dripping in lights because daylight would outshine those manmade light sources. Not now, though. Now every bit of light in the darkness stands out and makes you notice it. I find my eyes drawn to the lights now on my way home. There’s one house, a McMansion really, that has been in full holiday light regalia now for a while, I wonder if they get bored seeing their holiday lights for such a long time.

Just as these lights and decorations pad in on kitten paws, the same happens after December 25th. Everyone has their own rituals. For some people they get that tree down right away (not many, I suspect). Others take it down by January 1st, no doubt to have it all done before hunkering down to the hard work of another year. Most people I know believe the tree and associated decorations come down on January 6th, Little Christmas, Epiphany to some. Others have no timeline in mind. Some outside decorations stay up all year. Depending on the snow and ice some may need to stay up until the Spring thaw.

I don’t decorate much anymore. The first year in our current house I was so happy to finally have a decent sized house that I went a bit crazy. I put up two trees; begged the husband to hang outside lights and generally decorated every room in the house.

I remember how much I loved it. I thought it looked like a wonderful holiday card (despite the fact that our house needed TONS of cosmetic improvements). December 26th dawned and suddenly I couldn’t wait to put everything away. The house felt overstuffed with crap. Things suddenly looked dingy. As quickly as everything went up (I did it in one Saturday top to bottom, I was on a tear); down it came. By January 1st it looked like Spring was just around the corner in our home. I felt tremendous relief to have all that space back.

Each year since then I’ve scaled back more and more. From two trees to one; from that one six foot tree to a tabletop three foot tree; from that tabletop tree to no tree. From swags of faux evergreens on the stairs topped off with a giant C’mas stocking to just the stocking; to nothing. By this past year I put out a few of my snowpeople items in a few places. That was it.

I’m not a humbug (or am I?) I just realized that it was a lot of work putting the stuff up and even more work taking it down. I like to look at other people’s decorations I just no longer feel the burning need to do the same.

So once again I’ll watch as front lawns and windows morph from nothing special to magical wintery delights and then I’ll watch again as they slowly fade to black. The only decoration, if we have another winter like last year, will be piles and piles of ice and snow, melting to a mushy gray before accepting another winter coating to cover up the dreariness.

Or if this Winter is like many other years those lights and magical fairylands will fade to nothing more than dreary gray days and long nights filled with cold, sleet-y rain. One day the weather will take an unseasonable jump in temperature and we’ll all notice that the night was a little less long. Some weeks will pass and we’ll notice that the earth is thawing, the dogs are once again tracking their muddy paws through the house instead of limping in holding their paws up to be gently de-iced and warmed up.

Just as silently as the holiday lights and decorations appeared they’ll disappear.

She’s a witch! Burn her!

I have two questions for the tea party today. I’m sure I have more but these two just make me twitchy.

From what I’ve heard in some random news bytes there is at least one candidate running that would make abortion a criminal offense even in the case of rape or incest. I’ve heard that there may be as many as four or five candidates with this same mindset. Now my broad understanding of the whole tea party platform is that they want less government. They want the government out of their business. They don’t want government bailouts for businesses. They don’t want taxes to cover healthcare costs. They want the government to be as minimal as possible.

If you want less government regulation then how could you want to make a medical procedure a criminal offense? It seems to me that they are selective in where the government control would lie. In areas that they want control then allowing the government to step in would be fine but in other cases it wouldn’t be fine. Somehow that doesn’t add up for me. Can anyone explain this to me? Rationally?

My second question is about the candidate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, who was accused of “dabbling in witchcraft” at some time in her past. Now in the case of Ms. O’Donnell the question is complex and multi-faceted. Let me start out by saying that I don’t support her politics but I DO support her right to practice Wicca.

Here again we Americans can’t quite face reality. We have freedom of religion here. We are allowed to practice any religion we choose; or no religion at all. Wicca is an actual belief system and the reality of it in many cases is that it is very spiritual that respects the natural world and tries to find where us humans fit in that world. There is no crime in being Wiccan, in fact it’s my understanding that Arlington National Cemetery now allows Wiccan symbols on grave markers there.

So if Ms. O’Donnell was or is a practicing Wiccan so what? Really, so what? There seems to be some underlying belief that although we are granted freedom of religion in the constitution that the founding fathers didn’t really MEAN that. They really meant freedom of religion as long as those religions were Christian or maybe Jewish but all that other stuff, nah, they didn’t mean those religions. Or maybe the people who believe this don’t believe that there are any religions that don’t fall into the Judeo/Christian categories hence if someone claims to believe something else it isn’t a “real” religion anyway.

So I have multiple issues with this. First, I don’t think that Ms. O’Donnell’s religious affiliation should have been a campaign issue. I think her opponent dug it up and aired it, bad form there. But then her response in many ways supported the slur campaign against her by having her frantically try to deny it in some fashion. The real response should have been that her religious affiliation, whatever it may be, is supported by the constitution of the country she is trying to serve by running for public office.

We’re nuts here in the US. We really are. Political campaigning is now not much different than any other form of bullying. It’s no longer about the issues but about how much you can tear down your opponent. I care what you’ll do to keep my taxes within reason and what I’ll do about healthcare if I lose my job. I don’t care what your campaign workers dug up about your opponents in their far distant past. Once we get to a certain age we’ve probably all done a few things in our life that we’re just not too proud of, we’re HUMANS, WE’RE FLAWED, deal with it!

Remember US citizens go out and vote tomorrow it’s a privilege you should use.