Holidaze

November 29, 2004

OrnamentsNow that the long awaited 4-day week­end has come and gone, at the blink of an eye I might add, it’s time to patiently await the arrival of Christ­mas and more impor­tantly pre­pare for the onslaught of hol­i­day shop­pers, cranky dri­vers and bell ringers. Every year around this time I ready myself for the crazi­ness of the hol­i­days and yet it never really mat­ters because I become caught up in the hol­i­day fever as well.

This year how­ever, my wife and I have already decided that the major­ity of our shop­ping will take place online. We fig­ure by tak­ing this strat­egy we’ll avoid most of the hol­i­day craze when peo­ple are caught in a zombie-like trance to pil­lage and plun­der local Tar­gets, K-Marts and KB Toys for the lat­est and great­est toy gad­get for their chil­dren. Luck­ily, for the time being, my daugh­ter is still young enough where she isn’t entranced by toys but con­sid­er­ing her first birth­day is next month it won’t be long until she’s tug­ging at our pant legs and star­ing up at us with those sting­ing puppy dog eyes.

I’m reminded of John Grisham’s Skip­ping Christ­mas (renamed Christ­mas with the Kranks for the Hol­ly­wood adap­ta­tion), a satir­i­cal view of the hol­i­days. The main char­ac­ters, Luther and Nora Krank, decide that they’ll skip Christ­mas after send­ing their daugh­ter off to Peru for Peace Corps. Luther tal­lies up the pre­vi­ous years expenses for Christ­mas and esti­mates they can save in the thou­sands if they take a 10-day cruise instead of cel­e­brat­ing the afore­men­tioned hol­i­day. Of course chaos erupts and the rest of the book is per­fect mate­r­ial for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood Christ­mas com­edy, includ­ing a mad­cap sequence with a plas­tic snow­man and the embarass­ment of set­tling with a scrappy look­ing tree.

It just goes to show that no mat­ter how hard you try to ignore, strate­gize or avoid Christ­mas it’s never going to dis­ap­pear. You sim­ply can­not wipe Christ­mas from your cal­en­dar. It’s the prover­bial mon­key on your back, but in this case he’s wear­ing a santa cap with a 30 pound sack of presents slung over his shoulder. 

5 comments

Amen brother… Now that we’re all grown up in the fam­ily and not hav­ing chil­dren of our own (yet), I can’t imag­ine what is like to cope with the pres­sure of a child on a toy store. I don’t know about you but we’ve been bom­barded with Christ­mas pro­pa­ganda since… well, from as early as mid-August (no kid­ding!) and some depart­ment store’s take on this mat­ter is, to say the least, deliri­ous. I can’t believe how much is spent on bom­bas­tic dis­plays only to tear them off a month later.

I don’t want to sound like a sour­puss — it’s just that, now that I’m well past my quarter-life cri­sis, I con­ceive Christ­mas more as a time to spend together with those you love and reflect on real fam­ily val­ues, spe­cially when your fam­ily mem­bers just get older with each pass­ing year… mak­ing the time spent even more worthwhile.

by beto on November 29, 2004 at 1:15 pm. Reply #

Beto:

I con­ceive Christ­mas more as a time to spend together with those you love and reflect on real fam­ily val­ues, spe­cially when your fam­ily mem­bers just get older with each pass­ing year… mak­ing the time spent even more worthwhile.

That’s exactly what Christ­mas is about, aside from the gift giv­ing and drunken par­ties. ;)

by kartooner on November 29, 2004 at 1:22 pm. Reply #

I’m going to see this movie on Thurs­day even though the movie has got­ten bad reviews. What can I say?…I’m a fan of Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Cur­tis. So, bad or good…its Christ­mas and time to see movies like this.

The movie may not be a ‘Howard the Duck’ but its a night out in a small town.

by bud on November 29, 2004 at 10:32 pm. Reply #

There’s another rage con­cern­ing Santa Claus in the Nether­lands at the moment. There’s a long story behind it all: Sint Nico­laas (or Sin­terk­laas) was a bishop from Mira, Turkey, who was a man of good deeds. In this era of the world, he’s just a fig­ment of the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion, but the essence is still there. He has negro ser­vants and gives all chil­dren presents. But your so-called Santa Claus is his fat, Amer­i­can­ised clone, taken to the US a long, long while ago (pre­sum­ably) by Dutch explor­ers.
Now, back to the real action: Sin­terk­laas is on the fifth of Decem­ber, but in Novem­ber already, stores are laid out for Christ­mas. So the risk is that an age-old Dutch tra­di­tion might be sat upon by his fat neme­sis and clone (oh, the irony!), an imported ver­sion of our own tra­di­tion is tak­ing over. Now, many peo­ple don’t want this, but many stores just pay atten­tion to Christ­mas more than to Sin­terk­laas, which is a shame.

And I don’t like buy­ing shit for Christ­mas anyway.

by Rob Mientjes on November 30, 2004 at 11:42 am. Reply #

Rob: Wow man, thanks for the his­tory behind Sant.. err.. Sin­terk­laas. It’s too bad he was Amer­i­can­ized as much as he was because in my mind, Sin­terk­laas just sounds cooler, both pho­net­i­cally and aesthetically.

by kartooner on November 30, 2004 at 11:56 am. Reply #

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