Belle Chimes In • Some Christmas Truth

It's the holidays, and like many of us grownups, when I was young, I started counting down to this time of year sometime around Martin Luther King Day when all the big holiday vacations were done and all we had to look forward to was three months of industrial gray suck before blue skies returned for Spring Break. Sure, there was Valentine's Day but that's not a day off and it's too much pressure to turn your life into a Nicholas Sparks novel for a day.

So, now, Belle is old and the holidays are no longer a time to relax and check the boxes for The Grinch, Rudolf, and 24 hours of A Christmas Story. In my parental years, Christmas is little more than a deadline. And it's harder to beat that deadline every year, even though I typically start asking my Beloved sometime in September to help me plan THE LIST. Aside from remembering all the names, we also have to decide how much of our paychecks we can set aside for three months so we don't set the credit cards on fire from all the swipe friction over last minute December weekend.

As much as I love Frosty and all the other Christmas TV specials, I don't really have too much time to watch television. Around November 1 I typically start blocking network shows from my little Offspring Elf because I just can’t stand another 30-second spew of plastic that is generally pink and really loud — otherwise known as a commercial. Wasn’t the FCC going to make a law, like, 20 years ago that required broadcasters to lower the volume of commercials from, say, 747-ish to reasonable?

Unlike Mama Elf—who watches almost nothing not recorded on the DVR, specifically so I can skip over commercials — “Hey, for just $29 you can have a toy that only has one function! There are eight in the set and you need them all so go get your mommy’s credit card!”

Finally, and this is a general fuss that has nothing to do with my family; when and why did we start talking about the “war” on Christmas? Depends on what you call a war. Granted, some are upset that Santa Claus is an old white guy, and that is exclusionary to all the non-white people who celebrate the holiday. I will stipulate that everyone is entitled to feel as they wish, and I never want people to feel excluded. Still, without boring you with my wiki-Christmas history, suffice to say most modern American Christmas traditions have almost exclusively come out of European history.

St. Nicholas himself was Greek, so maybe olive-skinned might be more accurate. But with dozens of icons to choose from to represent the holiday, can’t it just be okay that the people who like Santa can stick to the original Father Christmas (who actually wore blue and multi-color coats in various legends until Coca-Cola dressed him in red)?

And let’s remember our country encourages us to do a lot of things as we wish as long as we don’t tell others they can’t. So hey, you don’t *have* to celebrate with a guy in a red suit. If seeing a paisley hippopotamus on roller skates will give you a feeling of hope and giving, I’ll send the memo to Hallmark to get busy on a new line of ornaments. The icons of the day shouldn’t change the ambiance and sentiment of anything.

Seriously, would anyone even think of going over to Hong Kong and complaining that none of the dragons in the New Year parade have cowboy hats? Has anyone ever asked to have more red, white, and blue in the Kwanzaa stamp? No, because that’s how the people who celebrate those holidays do it. And I’m not sure what people are complaining about at Starbucks this year but I’m sure it’s something, and if you can afford a $7 coffee, there are plenty of down-on-their-luck people in every neighborhood who have bigger problems in December.

So let’s all go to our respective corners, celebrate the birth of Jesus—or the oil that lasted eight days, or whatever it is you choose do around the Winter Solstice—any way you want, pray for peace on Earth, and enjoy the generalized spirit of the season.

And that includes letting me invite the Amazon delivery driver for turkey dinner because we've seen each other every day since September and my dogs like him better than they like me now.

P.S. – Yes, Generation-X, “Die Hard” IS a Christmas movie