Sunday Sermon

Creeping Hollowdaze
(set phasers on "sarcastic")

Last Monday, I saw my first Christmas decorations. It was at Ace Hardware - a row of artificial trees in the front windows. I'm sure these were not the earliest decorations up, but they were the first of which I really took notice. It reminded me of my childhood, when the stop-action Norelco Santa riding a floating-head razor through the snow was the first sign of impending Yule (if you don't get that reference, you were probably born too late to experience the weirdness that was Seventies television...). I recall watching for that commercial, and for the arrival of the Sears catalog, "The Wishbook".

I fondly remember my sister and I going through the toy pages of that venerable tome, circling the items we wanted Santa to bring. It was always Barbie corvettes or dreamhouses for her, G.I. Joe's and skateboards for me. Those were magical times for us... much more magical, in fact, then the opening of the socks and underwear we actually received on Christmas morning.

My point in all this awkward reminiscing is that those harbingers generally arrived right around Thanksgiving, or maybe the week before. Now, Christmas ads begin just before Halloween, and retailers literally shove the ghosts and skeletons off the shelves and into clearance bins to make way for wreaths and candy canes; Thanksgiving has been almost completely run over. The reason for this is obvious - Christmas and Halloween are the number one and two holidays for retailers. As with just about every damn thing in our lives, it's all about the money.

I understand that many retailers make the bulk of their money in the last quarter of the year, and I am certainly aware that my ranting will make no difference, but am I the only one who wants Christmas to be confined to December?

The calendar is actually set up pretty well. There's about a month between Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas; I need that time! I have to rest up, to prepare myself for the traditional rites of guilt, innuendo, and public drunkeness for which Irish Catholics are so famous. There's even a special training regimen that I have to adhere to in order to stave off the arterioschlerosis and diabetes that come as side dishes with our family recipes (to be honest, that "training regimen" involves increasing my daily alcohol intake about three-fold, but I digress).

So let's keep the hollowdaze where they belong, and remember what each of the last three months of the year are about; October is for tooth decay and binge drkining, November is about gluttony and an ethnocentric reconstruction of history, and December focuses on the birth of the Patron Saint of Capitalism, Santa Clause.

Go in Peace.