It’s that time of year again. A time for people to go out en masse and trample each other to death as they rush into their local Wal-Mart looking for that last minute gift for their kids. A time for people to stress over spending money they don’t have to satisfy the family tradition of exchanging gifts with people they don’t even talk to that often. A time for that unlucky person to spend two hours washing dishes after cooking all day to host the family dinner. Yes, friends…the end of another year is upon us. Joy to the flippin’ World.
Speaking of worlds being overjoyed, Christmas is just one out of a long list of holidays celebrated around this time (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Captain Picard Day, etc).
“I think the resemblance is rather striking, don’t you agree Number One?”
People get so wrapped up in the holidays that they stress themselves out and end up wishing that the “stupid holiday would just be over already.” Some people see these holidays as an excuse to go door to door to openly praise their deity through song, even if they sound like a cat in heat. If we take a step back however and examine Christmas and its holiday equivalents for the morals that they try to convey it ends up not being so bad. Christmas, for example, somehow went from the celebration of the birth of the late J.C. to “Dad, I didn’t want Power Rangers Alpha Beta Tango, I wanted Power Rangers Alpha Beta Delta Charlie Moo Shu Pork Blah Blah Blah!”
Honestly, he had the right idea until his traitorous heart grew three sizes bigger.
The holiday season is about spending time with your loved ones. It’s not about maxing out your credit card or stressing over the details of the marketing ploy that your holiday has become. When you have kids, it does give you a nice excuse to show your love for them and buy them gifts. What kid doesn’t like free stuff? What’s funny however is that I don’t remember the GIFTS I got for Christmas so as much as the PEOPLE I was around during the holiday season.
This year marks the first year my son learned the truth about who Santa really was. It made me take a step back and realize just how short life was and just how quickly he was growing up. I sat down with him and had a talk about it, doing my best to explain that even though there was no six hundred pound psychopath that physically breaks into your house via a small chimney and leaves free stuff that there was still an important lesson to be learned.
To quote an excerpt from something that was quoted during ALF’s Christmas Special:
“Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”
I probably should have told him that my chimney is capped.
The editor from the New York’s Sun summed it up for Virginia nicely. If you lookup the whole editorial you’ll notice that Kmart’s return policy is nowhere to be found. Moral of the story? When you are about to flip out at your fellow shopper or pull your hair out over how much food you have to cook for your family, take a step back and see these holidays for what they really are and not what society has made them. Be thankful for what you do have and teach your children in turn to be thankful for what they have.
May you live long and prosper this holiday season.
Editor’s note: I wanted to draw the Enterprise shooting Santa and his reindeer out of the sky with photon torpedoes but A) I am not good at art and B) I didn’t have enough glitter.