Yes, it’s the Christmas selling season. We don’t even wait for Halloween to be over any longer, with perhaps the slightest hint of a truce for the Remembrance Day Ceremonies, and then right back at it. This record came home when I was about nine years old. It gave me a somewhat different perspective on Christmas:
Of course there’s also Black Friday to get through, but in Canada there seem to be a series of Black Fridays and other Black Days. It also seems that the back-to-school routine, which starts about the time students hit the beach in July, is barely cold in its grave when the Halloween sugar orgy fires up. In addition, the aforementioned Remembrance Day observations seem to have stretched out into a month or six weeks of breast beating and bleating about the freedoms we enjoy as a consequence of the sacrifice made by current and previous generations. I fully subscribe to the notion that we should honour, cherish and care for those who serve the greater good of society, and it’s galling that the politicians who are always front and centre at the ceremonies and who bleat the loudest (well, not quite as loudly as Donald S.) are those who plot to send these folks on what are most often the business of business, indefensible missions to chase people of colour off the land under which is hidden our oil, gold, diamonds, potash, lithium or whatever else is necessary to keep the consumerist wheels turning. What seems to pass entirely under the radar, besides the nonsensical idiocy of the missions, is that we’re still doing diplomacy about the same way Metternich did post-Napoloenic Europe, and that these wars clearly represent a failure of diplomacy and a failure to address the structures that underlie that (lack of) diplomacy. But I know that we will really have come off the rails when I see Valentine’s greetings before we finish the Christmas orgy of consumption.
It puts me in mind of something that St.-Éxupéry wrote in The Little Prince, where the fox is talking with the Little Prince about what makes one day distinguishable from another:
“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.
“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”
There is so much noise about special occasions that the occasions are less and less special. The celebrations are so ritualized that they risk losing any personal meaning or context: this works out well when the message from one holiday to another is that we ought to go out and buy stuff, and shopping is pretty much the same, window dressing aside, from one occasion to the next.
So Mr. Lehrer, you say it so well:
“Christmas time is here, by golly, disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly, fill your cup and don’t say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks, and chickens, mix the punch, drag out the Dickens,
Even though the prospect sickens, brother, here we go again!”