For years (like about 9 of them) I was a enjoying hating the heavily Xian oriented holiday season. It's everywhere and it's easy to resent (just ask any Jew). But the emotional charge seems to have leaked out of it for me and that is very welcome indeed.
I think for me it was learning winter skills like skiing and snowshoeing so I had good reasons to anticipate the season, but other major factors are of course Terri and her emotionally healthy family, the dogs, and a learned deafness to commercials or at least a learned apathy towards them. I still hear them but don't feel the emotional tentacles that they extend. Also the only thing I do is ski more, socialize, go to parties, occasionally bake things, and try to make notice of Winter Solstice and wish the Sun a safe journey back to us in that Pagan-lite sort of way.
I haven't volunteered at Kung Pao Comedy for a couple of years and I miss it and hope to do so again. I owe the Jewish community (let's hear it for overly vague phrases) a lot for helping me through the tougher times of the more recent holidays. And for realizing that you don't have to be or act a certain way during this time. and that Chinese food tastes really good at this time. :)
We'll go to Terri's brother's today and I'll just try to enjoy watching the kids have fun. Oh and I'll train my dogs too.
I just got this spam dated Dec 25 7:27am. Subject: Summer is almost here, be ready!
Well at least it's after Winter Solstice. Barely.
1 comment:
I'm catching up on my blog reading today instead of doing ANYthing I'm supposed to be doing.
The emotions around the christmas holiday season take some interesting turns. I was raised protestant but consider myself agnostic. For many years, I greeted people with "Happy Holidays," not because I didn't like Christmas, but because I suspected that there were a lot of non-Christians out there who wouldn't necessarily welcome the Christmas greeting (sounds like you're confirming my suspicions). But then--it got to where you were SUPPOSED to say Happy Holidays. That's when I went back to saying Merry Christmas, because it became politically incorrect to identify the Christmas season as the Christmas season, and call it something else instead. Bah humbug to THAT--in fact, THAT's what has pissed me off. An example, when I was a kid in Santa Monica, every year the city displayed the whole xmas story in a series of creche-type displays with life-sized figures along the bluff overlooking the pacific. I loved looking at those displays; they were like magic to me. But then they stopped because of the insistance on separation of church and state, so either the city had to start making equivalent displays for EVERY religion or stop doing that one.
I'm a big fan of the separation of church and state. I'm a big antifan of political correctness for the sake of political correctness. Tell me whether anyone was hurt by having those displays.
But thank goodness we're safe from Santas using that offensive Ho Ho Ho thing. ;-) (Not!)
-ellen
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