Always Another Windmill

I hate Christmas. Well, O.K., I don’t really hate Christmas,  not totally.  I do hate the commercialism, the frenzy, Santa, the elves, the reindeer. and, well, really most of the trappings of the secular holiday that has come to be called by the name of the Christian holiday which I formerly called Christmas, but I now find myself trying to distinguish by calling it the Feast of the Incarnation. Or maybe we should rename the Christian festival to an unpronouncable symbol to make it harder to commercialize and appropriate, and they everyone can just call it TCHFKAC?The religious conservatives who gripe about the so-called “War on Christmas” absolutely baffle me.  Secular culture starts giving hints that maybe they would like to stop appropriating the name of the largely unrelated Christian holiday that happens at around the same time, and these Christians start screaming “No! We insist that you continue to use the name and symbols of our tradition for your pagan feast of greed gluttony and mammon! Otherwise, you have declared war on us!”  WTF? The war on Christmas began decades ago, and is really pretty much over.  We lost, the corporations won.  Where have y’all been?And I hate the creep. It was bad when Christmas started appearing before Thanksgiving, worse when it came right after Halloween, and now we’ve reached the point where Christmas stuff comes out in stores well before Halloween stuff does, and so I’ve already been carefully ignoring it for months. I added the website IsItChristmas.com to my feed reader, where everyday it answers with a simple, firm and resolute “NO”.Then, one of my favorite new blogs, An Entirely Other Day, posted this helpful little rant in early November:  

Dear Christmas,

Get the hell away from me. It’s early November, you son of a bitch. You don’t belong here. Go away. . . I will not spend the next six weeks listening to your happy, vomitous prattle. I will not spend fully twelve percent of my life with elves and bells and goddamned Santa. I will not. 

I use it as a sort of defensive incantation whenever I feel like the elves and all are pressing in too closely.  Then the avalanche of catalogs started pouring in, each one a little trojan horse full of Santa’s minions.  At first they just all went straight to the recycling bin, but then L.L. Bean started sending me two–TWO of every. damn. catalog. Which they send out like every other day.  You know, I feel all self consciously white and middle class buying anything from Bean at all, but when I’m rewarded for doing so with an extra 10 pounds of recycling to haul out of the house every damn week, that’s it.  Never again.  And then I found Catalog Choice and have been gleefully nuking catalogs (how did these people even find out that we have a child?) ever since.  I’ll probably have to start all over again when we move next summer, but at least I’ll have a head start.But now I’m reaching the point where it can no longer be avoided.  Amazon wishlists have been tidied.  Alternative wishlists are in the works.   My anti-christmas playlist is ready in iTunes to wipe out the awful saccharine taste of the usual holiday standards.  Fine.  I give in.  Time to prepare, time to try and remake the secular Christmas bustle into some sense of Advent preparation.  Get ready.  Here it comes.

It’s been quite a day.

It started off fairly well, if a little early. Zag probably started waking up around 6 am (residual effects of the time change, no doubt), and by 6:30 it was clear that he was not going back to sleep, so I got up so that at least WB could get a little more sleep, especially as she slept poorly the night before and has been feeling sick. So Zag and I got up. Zag was in a great mood–cheerfully used the potty, and then he though we should make breakfast for Mama. Mama, it turned out, got upwith just enough time to get dressed and drink her coffee before she had to go off for her day working at the hospital for CPE.

Zag and I had a fairly smooth morning–he ate a good sized plate of scrambled eggs, cooperated with getting dressed, was excited to go spend the day with E and her 3-year, A, and we got out of the house. Things went unusually well.

Well, of course, the fates have a way of making sure THAT kind of thing doesn’t last if you get too cocky about it. (more…)