Monday, Oct. 30, 2006

Tumbleweeds Begone!

Hey. Hi. How the Hell are ya?

*cough*

*listens to the sounds of crickets as all but three of her twelve readers have wandered off in boredom*

Alrighty then!

I actually did try and post an entry about a week ago, but... the Internet ate it. Again. I don't know what it is that makes my posts so damn tasty, but I'm going to start painting them with habanero sauce if this behavior keeps up. Because... damn.

So, and then, on the other 45 kajtrillion days between now and my last post, I've been working working working. This is the hectic time of year for my line of work, and we've been up to our collective ass in samples. Hopefully, however, things should start to calm down in the next month. Meanwhile, I'm racking up overtime, just in time for the holidays.

Speaking of. Grr.

And, yes, this topic has been covered on pretty much every journal and weblog you'll run across, but oh well. I gots stuff to say about it.

I know this will probably mark me as horribly old, but when I was a kid, very few people put up Christmas/holiday decorations before Thanksgiving. And, that includes the stores. The holidays were a special time, and part of the ritual was the chronology of the thing -- we had Halloween, which ushered in November, which led to Thanksgiving preparations, and then after those were all done, December was all about Christmas, for our family. We did all of our shopping in the first two weeks of December, wrote letters to Santa, decorated the tree, strung lights, made tacky paper chains out of green and red construction paper strips that would wrap around the house 14 times, and then it was Christmas Day. Once that was over, we kept decorations up until New Year's, then, pretty much, it all came down, until next year.

And that was FINE with me. It was good. It IS good, as I prefer it that way. To me, this is the way it should be. But noooo. We had the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales, which were fine until they became an event in and of themselves. Then, we had the year-round Christmas decoration stores, which violated many of my sensibilities, but were fairly easily avoided. And then, I don't know what happened, but the holiday season just... exploded. Morphed. Became its own entity.

It's not even necessarily about the evils of consumerism to celebrate a holiday that, at its roots, is probably about as far as you can get from buying cheap Walmart shit for your great uncle on double clearance at 6am in the middle of the July Madness Ultra Super Cool Pre-Independence Day Stock Up For Christmas Sale. It's about taking the magic of the season and making it commonplace. It surrounds us all the time, inundating our senses, so that by the time December rolls around, everyone's all, "Oh. Candy canes. Big whoopie."

I remember several comedians of the 80s who would make jokes about how we'd start seeing Christmas in the stores at the beginning of November. Then it was before Halloween. Nowadays, their acts have had to change to make that date Memorial Day because, after that? Tinsel sneaks into the stores like a thief and starts stealing shelf space, reserving it for its cousins, Garland, Ornaments and Cheesy Light-Up Reindeer.

I guess we've officially become a comedian's stand up routine, eh?

saturncat at 7:37 a.m.

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