ACCUSE ME OF BEING THE GRINCH, but I have a few problems with Christmas.
PROBLEM #1: The music goes on and on and on, and you hear it everywhere; on the radio, in the stores and the sidewalks in front of the stores, in tv commercials. If you cannot provide your own music you need to either wear a noise canceling headset (not suitable for drivers) or hide out in a soundproof room.
#2. Decorations are everywhere. They are lovely IN the home and OK IN the stores, but not so much on the highways and byways. Never mind that tax dollars pay to put up – and later take down – the decorations in most communities. (There are those, such as Ely NV, where the Jaycees do the work gratis.) The taxpayer also has the joy of paying for the extra electricity the electric decorations require.
The REAL problem is that the decorations, particularly the lights make it difficult to see traffic signals.
#3. Christmas is – surprise – not everyone’s holiday. Granted, the majority of Americans either are Christians or they are “into” the commercial holiday; keeping up with Jones in gift giving and receiving. (To be fair to the merchants, many depend on the Christmas buying to make – or break – their financial year.) The Christmas symbols – primarily “borrowed” from pagan worshipers of trees and poisonous plants (mistletoe and poinsettias) and “yule logs” among others – are OK in small doses, but, as with the music, they are easily over done. Christmas day itself – December 25 – is when pagans, worried that winter never would end, realized that it was close to the Winter Solstice1 … when the days once again lengthen and the fear that “the world is about to end” is set aside until next winter. The Winter Solstice for 2017 falls on Dec. 21.
#4. Some folks simply go overboard on decorations. There is one family in the neighborhood that puts up more lights than Carter ever had “little liver pills.”2 There are so many lights the neighbors have complained to the city; the home owners with the lights simply thumb their noises at their complaining neighbors. “Bah, humbug to the community.” Add to the lights the notoriety of the place causes traffic jams to further aggravate the neighbors.
#5. While for some the season brings out the best in humanity, for others it brings out thieves, pick-pockets, con artists, brazen burglars, and other miscreants.
#6. From Thanksgiving until Christmas, organizations make headlines proclaiming they feed the needy – for one day. What about the rest of the year? Don’t people get hungry in January? How about March? If anyone has funds to feed the hungry, give those funds to organizations that either feed the hungry year round or that run food banks.
#7. As with #6 above, the “milk of human kindness” flows more generously between Thanksgiving and Christmas; once the New Year party’s hangover are history, the “milk” turns rancid. (As an aside, New Years actually is a Jewish celebration. How so? Jesus was a Jew, a fact with which almost everyone agrees. Jews circumcise their sons on the boy’s eighth day of life unless the child’s health prevents it. Count the days between Christmas and New Years and you’ll see that New Years is eight days from Christmas. Never mind that Jesus’ real birthday, according to some scholars3, was something other than December 25th.)
8. Christmas, with its focus on gift giving, can cause the less financially fortunate extreme discomfort. Little Susie is getting a special (read expensive) anatomically incorrect doll and little Joey is getting a new 16-speed bike with all the bells and whistles. The less fortunate girl might get a rag doll and the boy a second hand no-speed two-wheeler sans bells and whistles. It’s a competitive world where bragging rights belong to the kids – and their parents – of whoever got the most and fanciest loot. (Sad but true.)
9. Too many families, gathering for a Christmas meal, end up in acrimonious battles, sometimes due to too much Christmas “spirits.”
10. Highway fatalities increase. Some due to over-tired drivers, some to weather, and some to too much Christmas “spirit.” Some simply due to a distracted driver. The end result is, unfortunately, the same.
1. Winter Solstice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice
2. Carter’s Little Liver Pills: http://tinyurl.com/y9uzodgy
3. Jesus’ birth date: http://tinyurl.com/gw3p52k
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
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