Bah, humbug!

Yes, it’s Scrooge talking to you here—Scrooge, the Grinch, any character you can think of who will rain on the orgy which Krismus has become in the last however many years you want to date it back to. Decorations? Right after I bought my mobile home back in October ’89, my friends at church had a house-warming party for me, and as it was then close to Krismus and the house-warming gifts were all supposed to be tacky and tasteless, I got several tacky and tasteless Krismus decorations, the details of which I will not go into. I never took them down. They have been in the same place 365¼ days a year for 18 years now, not only just as tacky and tasteless but now covered with 18 years of dust as well. That’s my Krismus decorations.

No, I won’t go into how the “true spirit of Christmas” has been corrupted and raped by commercialism; that ground has been gone over so many hundreds of time by so many hundreds of people that it’s a dead horse (block that metaphor!). My diatribe is simply that IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET! Re-read that carefully: IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET!! I have no objection to Christmas being properly celebrated when it is Christmas, but in the liturgical calendar (look it up; I’m not going to explain here what the liturgical calendar is), Christmas starts on the 25th (and runs until 5 January), it does not end then. Up until then, it is Advent: looking forward expectantly to Christmas, preparing for it. For this reason, I refuse to sing or play Christmas carols (or whine and moan if I’m pressured into it) and am, if anything, perhaps more upset by the blasphemous mangling of them which is blared in every store than I am by the commercialism. (And when I use the term “Christmas carols,” I mean Christmas carols, not secular abominations like “Rudolph the purple-assed baboon” and “I’m dreaming of a green cash till” and “I saw Mommy blowing Santa Claus” and “Roadkill roasting on an open fire”—although I am rather fond of “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.” I kind of like to hear the secular songs mangled; it somehow seems appropriate to the spirit of commercialism.) I guess it’s supposed to be a well-intentioned effort to put some kind of half-assed “Christmas spirit” into the spending frenzy, but for me it has the opposite effect of making the spending frenzy a little more obscene.

This confusion of seasons adds an extra dimension of irritation to the continuing circus side-show of that obnoxious, demagogic clown O’Reilly when he keeps yapping about how one symptom of the alleged “war on Christmas” is the fact that salespersons in stores have the temerity to say “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Actually, the first is considerably more appropriate than the second: it is a secular holiday, but it is not Christmas, and it is therefore incorrect to chastise people for failing to say “Merry Christmas.” Of course, one could hardly expect such an ignorant twit as O’Reilly to know this; he probably never heard of Advent or the liturgical calendar. But even though his trumped up war on Christmas is a hoax, I must admit to being slightly saddened that the singing of Christmas carols is no longer allowed in schools.

The city of Boulder (Colorado) has for decades put a large star made of lights (I’m not sure how large, maybe 100 feet end to end?; large enough to be visible from 20 miles away) on the prominent hillside (Flagstaff Mountain) west of town during the holidays, and it’s a tradition dearly loved by almost everyone in the city. Almost. As you might have expected, some obnoxiously militant atheist got up in arms years ago about the display of a Christian symbol on government land (it’s part of the Boulder Parks system)—you know the routine. A friend of mine had an editorial letter published in the local paper, in which he suggested that if it would make this person feel better, we could change the display to a symbol of her faith: a huge zero. We need more sarcasm in daily affairs.

And don’t get me started on outdoor decorations, the most opulent of which can be seen from outer space without magnification. These are people who have obviously never heard of energy conservation. . . .