To Xmas or Not
I've been a bit conflicted since my last post where I basically shrugged off Christmas. Apparently there's a part of me that doesn't entirely want to let it go. At first I worried that I was just being influenced by the corporate Christmas machine, but as I almost reveled in my disgust for all of the ads and sales and promotions encouraging people to go deeper into debt just to buy more presents, I decided that wasn't it. Then I thought maybe I was just being swept along by the general population's notion that Christmas just IS and if you don't go along, something is wrong with you. But then I remembered that I loathe 99% of the general population and the last thing I'm going to do is go along with them. So I was left with it being some spark of Christmas spirit left inside me, which I took as a good thing.
That spark has grown a bit defiant as I've noodled this idea over the last few days. It wants to reclaim Christmas for myself and my family as I see it, not as the rest of the world sees it. It's got a bit of a "fuck-you" attitude to it, saying that we're going to make Christmas whatever the hell we want it to be. After all, that's how it all started, when the Catholics decided to combine a bunch of other religions' holidays to help their followers coalesce in the Dark Ages. To me, it's a fluid concept.
The problem is that to a large extent, my enjoyment of Christmas has always been about the "season"--I enjoy the long stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, not particularly the day itself. And enjoying that time depends largely on what's going on around me. It has to do with a general sense of being in the season, of having brief experiences that reconnect with something familiar from the past, or something cool I've seen in a movie (like walking in Central Park in the snow). And as the season itself becomes more and more annoying and crass, it's harder to enjoy that. Not to mention that working in a retail company where everyone loses their shit for the entire month of December and every little thing becomes a crisis, well, that takes some of the fun out of it. So basically, everyone else is ruining it for me.
My internal notion of Christmas has always been largely influenced by movies and TV (like everything else in my life). There are vignettes of other places and times that patch together to form the image and thought of what Christmas SHOULD be in my mind, none of which will ever be my reality. Thanks a lot Hollywood. But those things do help reconnect me to a feeling of familiarity, a sense that it IS Christmas, so I do my best every year to watch what I can.
I'm sad to know that tonight will be the last ER Christmas episode ever. For 15 years, ER has been my favorite alternate reality. I started watching it from the start, in 1994, when it seemed very possible that could be my life (still hadn't failed to get into med school then). An exciting career, a cool city, ER offered all that to my imagination. And the Christmas episodes almost always create that perfect, snow-covered, trapped-inside-so-we-better-make-the-best-of-it atmosphere along with some moving story that would make me cry like a girl. When the snow stops falling on County General each year, I'm always a bit disappointed--fictional Chicago in the winter is one of my favorite places.
That spark has grown a bit defiant as I've noodled this idea over the last few days. It wants to reclaim Christmas for myself and my family as I see it, not as the rest of the world sees it. It's got a bit of a "fuck-you" attitude to it, saying that we're going to make Christmas whatever the hell we want it to be. After all, that's how it all started, when the Catholics decided to combine a bunch of other religions' holidays to help their followers coalesce in the Dark Ages. To me, it's a fluid concept.
The problem is that to a large extent, my enjoyment of Christmas has always been about the "season"--I enjoy the long stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, not particularly the day itself. And enjoying that time depends largely on what's going on around me. It has to do with a general sense of being in the season, of having brief experiences that reconnect with something familiar from the past, or something cool I've seen in a movie (like walking in Central Park in the snow). And as the season itself becomes more and more annoying and crass, it's harder to enjoy that. Not to mention that working in a retail company where everyone loses their shit for the entire month of December and every little thing becomes a crisis, well, that takes some of the fun out of it. So basically, everyone else is ruining it for me.
My internal notion of Christmas has always been largely influenced by movies and TV (like everything else in my life). There are vignettes of other places and times that patch together to form the image and thought of what Christmas SHOULD be in my mind, none of which will ever be my reality. Thanks a lot Hollywood. But those things do help reconnect me to a feeling of familiarity, a sense that it IS Christmas, so I do my best every year to watch what I can.
I'm sad to know that tonight will be the last ER Christmas episode ever. For 15 years, ER has been my favorite alternate reality. I started watching it from the start, in 1994, when it seemed very possible that could be my life (still hadn't failed to get into med school then). An exciting career, a cool city, ER offered all that to my imagination. And the Christmas episodes almost always create that perfect, snow-covered, trapped-inside-so-we-better-make-the-best-of-it atmosphere along with some moving story that would make me cry like a girl. When the snow stops falling on County General each year, I'm always a bit disappointed--fictional Chicago in the winter is one of my favorite places.
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