I'm not sure if you're all aware of this, but Dicken's short story "A Christmas Carol" has had a great deal to do with the making of the modern incarnation of the Christmas holiday. Prior to his story, and the Victorian embrace of certain Germanic Christmas traditions, Christmas was just one of many Christian holidays celebrated from Michaelmas to All Saint's Day. It was BY NO MEANS the central Christian holiday of the year, as that honor rightfully belongs to the Easter holidays.
But along comes Dickens, followed by Coke and Madison Avenue, and make the holiday a festering knot of guilt and consumerism. We feel guilt if we don't buy buy buy. If we don't get the presents to everyone no time, or fail to act like the dancing, singing Ebenezer of Christmas morning, we are deemed grave sinners doomed to walk the afterlife in chains of our own making. But consider this. One Scrooge yelling at the messenger boy to get him the BIGGEST TURKEY post haste and showering all relations with gifts is a wonderful character. But 200 million of them, all doing it at once, is a NIGHTMARE of pushing and yelling. We burden ourselves and each other with unreasonable expectations and impossible demands. You can see it today at every shopping center and grocery store, and on every road.
I rode my bike down through the new snow about ten blocks to the store to get some groceries, as I ususally do on Sundays. The roads are generally quiet and people aren't in as big a hurry as they are during the week. But today I was screamed at twice and nearly killed once by speeding drivers trying to find a shortcut. Mind you, this is on poorly plowed side streets not on the main roads. I though I was going to have to shoot it out with one fellow who was SO ENRAGED that I slowed him down to 10 mph for fifteen feet as I rode from a parking lot to an alley that he had to stop his car (wasn't he in a rush?) and call me a long string of names I can't repeat here. I laughed at him and wished him a Merry Christmas, but his face was livid with red rage. Where the devil does that come from?
I think we would all do well to stop buying the biggest turkey in the store and stop buying presents for all but the small children. Take it back a few gears, and spread some of the attention around to more overlooked holidays and celebrations.
