Saturday, February 14, 2009

Making A Holiday

A friend of mine invented a name for the year end holidays. Ramachriskwanzooka is Ramadon, Christmas, Kwanza and Hanuka smooshed into a pablum of holidays that both the friend and I have had trouble, in the past, digesting.

I have hated Christmas songs from the origins of my acrid consciousness. Too, and though I may be homely, I boast of being truly averse to materialism. By nature, by natural selection of good taste, and not by the years of studied left wing thought, the mixed solemnity and greed makes me gag.
Nativity scenes remind me of wards where they tube feed crack babies. And then there is all the religeous conflict among Jews, Christians, Muslims and all alliances that hate the rival grouping for color, creed, mode of operation or cut of costume. From Thanksgiving till New Year's Day there is a reason per second to attack or flee. It's the time of year that thieves come out of the woodwork. I get depressed. Without the aid of good thought, the holiday season serves as nothing but a cold sheet steel sliding board into the freezing, rotten winter.

There is hope. In creative intelligence. The holiday, Ramachriskwanzooka, may include the entire late fall and complete winter. It remains a baby food of pureed hope and happiness, but it is an honest holiday for the bleakness of the weather. People around these parts, by and large, are missing a few spokes, by world standards in achievement. So until the month of April, it is a good idea to fertilize the barren mud with contrived spiritual mumbo jumbo.

A better reason, yet, for the four month holiday is that winter is slow physical degradation. I need a lot of brisk physical activity in warm sunlight to be all that I can be, in terms of joy and achievement. All winter the dearth of what is needed leaches away the life blood. To help, there isn't a transfusion, or an exorcism, just a home remedy for the blues. Winter blues. Invent a celebration.

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