At our house, I try not to think much about Christmas until after my wife's birthday on December 10. It seems wrong to me to submerge any December birthday in the annual culture blitz accompanying the biggest holiday of the year.
But today it's the 14th. We're back from a wonderful week visiting Arizona, full of the desert and pine forests, and I'm listening to the Downton Abbey Christmas album as I write this. We wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy new year!
I've already begun my usual round of Christmas rituals, dredging out many Christmas movies for their annual showings - from good George Bailey to little Ralphie, who only wants a bb gun for Christmas - and reading again Dickens' great Christmas ghost story. By Christmas eve I plan to be sated with carols and emotional overload. I might even look at "Christmas in Connecticut" once more, though to be honest, it's really a bad chauvinistic movie.
When I was a child, Christmas was a kind of silent war of wills between my parents. My father, though he felt the phrase "Keep Christ in Christmas" was banal, heavily emphasized the religious aspect of the day, the church organist at numerous Christmas Masses, and was a little contemptuous of the secular commercialism - Frosty, Rudolph and the rest. Mom, on the other hand, believed Christmas is a children's festival. Why not have Santa, lots of presents, and all the other foolishness of the holiday season? And so they battled behind closed doors over how much to spend on Christmas and on what. Mind you, Dad wasn't stingy. He was quite willing to spend money on us for things like musical instruments or educational toys. I remember a chemistry set as a Christmas present, and my brother who loved meteorology, never wanted for thermometers or other weather instruments.
Timing was also a kind of issue for them. I recall Dad saying that when he was a boy no one mentioned Christmas or a Christmas tree until Christmas eve. Then, one by one, the siblings would arrive home with bundles which they hustled out of sight to wrap and place under the tree that would be erected and decorated that night. I'm sure he thought that was the proper way to do things.
My mother's childhood was badly constrained by poverty, so I'm inclined to think she was compensating for her deprived early years by providing her children with the kind of opulent Christmas she never had. Accuse her of trying to buy our love if you want, I prefer to believe she had a warm heart and loved us all dearly. Usually she won out and he accepted the whole commercial holiday festival with more or less good grace.
My point here, and I do have one, is that we differ from one another in how we keep Christmas, or whether to keep it at all, and it behooves us to bend a little when we have differing opinions and enjoy the happiness of others, however they find it.
Merry Christmas to one and all!
