It's what the term love-hate was made for!

This Christmas thing is undoubtedly madness. I think it's definitely a case of 'just because everyone else is doing something, doesn't make it right.' Look at how we are behaving.

1) We're out in the snow, ice, bitter cold and exceptionally jammed up shopping centres in full force frantically hunting with Dunkirk spirit through shops for objects that match up to our idea of what someone else might deem desirable. (We all have more than enough clutter in our homes - most of which we have managed to shower on ourselves without anyone else helping and if we have kids, more than enough future plastic landfill).

2) We're in food shops buying immoral amounts of rich food that should make us feel ashamed in the light of people starving in the world. (Chances are we won't get through it all).

3) We're ordering a bird that just doesn't come in small family sizes - which we will cook and eat until we are sick of it. (Quite different from household management the rest of the year).

4) We've cut down trees so they can be tastefully (or in our case, gaudily) decorated with trinkets that we accumulate more of over time. (I hear some people have a different colour scheme/theme each year).

5) We're using paper for cards and wrapping that appears to mean Christmas has an exemption clause on anything moving in a 'green' direction.

6) We're lying to our kids about a man that knows whether they have been good or naughty and quite laboriously constructing stories that are needed to make his existence and remarkable job plausible. (Yet we also want our kids to question and have a good grasp of how the world works!)

7) And most of us have long since forgotten the underlying initiation of all this business - to the point of it being 'an irrelevant but sweet little undertone'.

8) And even more crazily, we're pinning an awful lot on making just one, little day exceptionally special - even though we know it's always a bit of a lazy anti-climax!

Yeah, but do you know what? I love it! Winter would be terrible without it - those pagans knew what they were doing!

Comments

  1. Molly Potter19 December 2009 at 19:26

    I know these are all madness cliches - and by definition being cliches should mean we are very aware of them - and yet we carry on. We are mad!

    ReplyDelete
  2. A Heron's View20 December 2009 at 00:38

    The underlying tone of this time of the year is surely and positively found in the sky and that Daylight increases minutely each day after the 21st December.

    Which in simple Pagan terms is all about the Rebirth of the Sun !

    ReplyDelete
  3. james20 December 2009 at 10:04

    I am only doing number 6 and a tiny tiny bit of number 5. I don't love it!!! I am thinking of getting rid of Christmas and introducing a much lovelier proper magical entirely non-commercial winter festival with no presents, turkey, cards, etc. Do you think the kids will go for it?! xxx

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mark In Mayenne20 December 2009 at 11:36

    I like the pagan element myself. I like the idea of celebrating the shortest day, in the knowledge that longer and warmer days are ahead.

    Trouble is, what with the time lag, the worst of winter is yet to come.

    ReplyDelete

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