Rick's December Tirade
Why I Can't Hate Christmas
I have a disturbing confession to make: I actually like
Christmas.
Mind you, I don't LOVE it the way I used to; most of the magic
seems to have worn off like the gold plating on a mediocre ballpoint
pen. All the same, I must confess to a lingering fondness for the
old holiday.
You're probably wondering, "What kind of cynic IS this guy,
anyway? Every honest, chronically alienated curmudgeon despises the
Yuletide and its fripperies with all his darkest and most malevolent
spleen. You WERE thinking that exact thought, in approximately those
words, weren't you? Then I suppose I have some explaining to do.
Let me assure you, to begin with, that I'm painfully aware of all
that is nonsensical about the twenty-fifth of December. This beloved
holiday has been providing first-rate fodder for cynics' potshots
since the days of Ebenezer Scrooge. And with good reason. If you
want to dismiss Christmas as humbug, just take a clear-eyed look at
the way we celebrate this most festive of feast-days.
Family members who barely tolerate your presence during the rest
of the year suddenly shower you with irrelevant gifts... Friends and
colleagues who have been stabbing you in the back send you
foil-embellished greeting cards and wish you good cheer... City
streets and shopping malls are ablaze with gaudy lights and
festooned with grotesque plastic gew-gaws... You're expected to
expose yourself to crowds of pushy, ignorant, malodorous shoppers,
many of whom are harboring communicable diseases... You risk a
premature heart attack dashing around in search of appropriate gifts
for a dozen or more people whose tastes you can't begin to fathom,
knowing full well that your efforts won't be adequately
appreciated... Innocent children begin to glow with the inner fire
of insatiable consumerism... You're forced to ingest platefuls of
highly caloric viands and sweetmeats that are destined to clog your
overtaxed arteries... If you're single and over the age of 35, you
experience unpleasant suicidal thoughts that manifest themselves in
unaccustomed ways ("Give me a third helping of pork chops,
please—and pass the gravy")... You emerge from the holidays
ten pounds heavier and several hundred dollars lighter... In short,
Christmas has degenerated into a two-month-long feeding frenzy of
commercialism, hypocrisy, greed and gluttony.
You already knew that, of course. But there's even more to
revile. What about the hollow cheerfulness... the disappointed
hopes... the indescribable loneliness foisted upon any solitary
thinking organism on this holiest of days! And we haven't even begun
to examine the holiday itself. What exactly are we celebrating on
December 25, anyway?
Aren't we commemorating the birthday of Christ, the designated
savior of our species? Well, yes and no. We really haven't a clue
WHEN he was born... it might have been on Columbus Day or the Fourth
of July.
The truth is that December 25 used to be the rowdy Roman (PAGAN
Roman, mind you) festival of Saturnalia, when wild-and-crazy men in
togas would run up and down the streets thwacking bystanders with
leather thongs. (The bystanders actually enjoyed this: it was
supposed to boost their fertility levels.) When the Romans turned
Christian and gave up leather thongs, they simply tacked a new
meaning onto the old holiday.
Very well, you say... but aren't we celebrating the miraculous
nature of Christ's birth, regardless of when it might have occurred?
Not so fast. According to the more fashionable theologians, we're
honoring an infant who in all likelihood wasn't the son of God
(assuming there IS a God), was conceived out of wedlock by a teenage
mother who probably wasn't a virgin, and grew up to become an
obscure itinerant preacher who probably didn't say or do one- tenth
of the things he's supposed to have said and done. (Depressing
thoughts, all of them... You'd think there would be a mass suicide
of theologians, but for some reason they seem to revel in their
revelations.)
What's left to celebrate, then? Christmas trees and glittering
ornaments? Simply a rural folk tradition exported from Germany when
Prince Albert arrived in England as Queen Victoria's royal
stud-muffin.
And what about Santa Claus—that jolly old elf, that bearded
embodiment of Christmas cheer and generosity? Hah! A wanton hoax...
a cruel jest perpetrated on generations of starry-eyed gentile
tots... a deliberate set-up for the most shattering of letdowns...
and, for countless proto-cynics, the sorry prelude to a life of
perpetual disillusionment: the discovery that your favorite sentient
being in the entire universe —someone you liked even better than
God and MisterRogers—is a sham, a shadow, a myth, a nonentity. And
worse yet, that you've been HOODWINKED.
So how can I profess that I like Christmas? The evidence against
it would seem to be more damning than Nixon's 18-minute gap or OJ's
bloody gloves.
Here's my secret. I look beyond the circumstantial evidence: the
tinsel, the plastic trappings, the false warmth and phony good
fellowship. I disregard the mass mania for retail merchandise. I eat
the food, of course—but I look beyond that, too.
What I see in Christmas is an annual opportunity to rejuvenate
our battered souls. Month after month, most of us take a drubbing
out there: jobs that crush our egos and fray our nerves...
relationships that remind us of our jobs... stocks that plummet
after we buy them and go through the roof the after we sell them...
the endless cycle of hope and disappointment... a relentless
onslaught of red lights, closed doors, new gray hairs, approaching
death, and socks mysteriously missing after we do the laundry.
And here's the sad irony: the more childlike we are, the more the
world tends to age and wither us. If we refuse to accept the ways of
the world, we pay for it with our youth. The stealthy grown-ups
thrive and prosper; the innocents suffer. That's how most of us
became cynics in the first place.
Christmas, on the other hand, REWARDS us for being childlike.
Strip away the gaudy commercial wrapping, refine it to its purest
essence and—dimly at first—you begin to see the real Christmas
emerge, as lovely and pristine as a snowflake. You begin to believe
that a virgin can give birth to a savior, that goodwill exists among
men, that reindeer can fly, that Santa Claus is more real than
Wal-Mart. You're a child again, brimming with hope and wonder.
Listen closely... shhh... isn't that the shuffling of Santa's boots
around the Christmas tree?
Chances are it's a burglar, but it's grand to believe
otherwise—if only for a few moments. Happy holidays! It's back to
reality soon enough.
