Morning AFter Pill
We come now to the day-after-christmas, a time of such relief that it seems almost depressing so vast is the weight suddenly absent. The English, in their strangely perceptive but oppressive way, celebrate a balancing holiday known as “Boxing Day” today in which individuals exchange roles for the day. The basic idea rather molders upon the biblical that the lowest shall be the highest and the highest, the lowest but the implementation is tempered, even poisoned in the implementation. This absence of rationality aside, the matter still remains that this is a means of bridging the vast chasm of sudden absence of imposed responsibility and obligation into a resumption of some sort of ordinary existence and living.
The comparable tradition in the Yankee republic seems to be the after-christmas-sale, which gives a slightly different opportunity to engage in a fierce competition and free for all brawl to obtain bargains of merchandise unwanted either before or after the holiday. Beyond the immediate consideration of how people have these funds remaining after doing their christmas shopping – is this type of immoderation actually budgeted? – there is the matter of why and what? Such questioning is rewarding because it reveals the real nature of these sales. In simple terms they are popular because of disappointment and frustration.
The gifts that people receive on christmas eve or morn are those things that the gift giver thinks the recipient should have, not necessarily, or even often actually, those things that the recipient wants. The current practice of giving money, either in the nekulturny form of actual paper portraits of discorporated conscript fathers (except the occasional metal coin with a token maternal figure, a recognition that makes us yearn for money with the visages of Carrie Nation, Lizzie Bordon, and Molly Pitcher, for nothing says coinage like carnage,) to pseudo-credit cards known simply as gift cards. While these have some small ameliorative effect of not inflicting unwanted and unwantable gear, that same action is itself frustrating – “am I so small and useless in your estimation that you will not even give me junk?” – as well as deferring any acquisition till today.
Hence and simply, the after-christmas-sale is what christmas has actually become, not a celebration of any spiritual or mystical, or even, philosophical values, but of “the accumulation of gear”. Modern christmas, most properly celebrated today when the rite of passage of ritual harassment and deprivation is past, is pure consumerism.
And in returning to our norm of incivility and selfdestruction, I note the PEW people have published a survey on the use of “merry christmas” and “happy holidays” as a greeting. [Link] Somehow it seems indicative of the depravity of the christmas season that the other winter solstice holy days, like winter solstice and festivus and kwanza and channukah, are unmentiond. There is something sadly despotic, dictatorial, oppressive even of a democracy who brags so loudly on its right of religious determination while imposing by deed and act a state religion, abetted by the forces of commerce and consumer abuse.
Such aside, I find both greetings objectionable under different circumstances. The use of “merry christmas” by money changers (to use a biblical illusion considerably abused by fundamentalist mystics of the state religion oligarchy,) or their modern equivalent of MalWart and the like, seems false and assumed, a classic allusion of the wolf clad in a sheep’s pelt. Also, I find the use of “happy holidays” by those unabashedly and pridefully politically correct for its own sake equally distasteful. I sense in this dissatisfaction a lack of patience with the foolishness of falsehood and pretension, of deliberate inaccuracy.
But further reflection reveals that such concern is only rational if there is some meaning to the season other than just pure consumerism. That meaning need not be mystical, at least in the sense of the religious addiction that reduces rationality to pond scum. It may be as insignificant as appreciation that the universe, our reality, has exhibited a regular turning point in its operation and that regularity may be expressed but its underlying causality still beyond our grasp of understanding and even origination.
