The End of (holi) Days

Sanity is about to return to our world. It’s the end of the holiday season.

There’s something about the period from November to January that appeals to our fascination with myth and revisionist history. First, we celebrate our early colonists at Thanksgiving. We devise dinners that supposedly reflect the first meal the colonists shared with the natives. We ignore our treatment of Native Americans, at that time up to the present. We pretend that we are all best of friends. Thanksgiving is our national celebration of our collective ignorance of history.

Thanksgiving gives way almost immediately to the run up to Christmas. The entire month of December is consumed by Christmas music in every store, Christmas spam in every inbox, Christmas tree lots in every vacant space. We somehow manage to ignore the point that whether you are celebrating the arrival of Santa or the birth of Jesus, you are celebrating a fictional character as if it was historical fact. We are slaves to our own imaginings. We created Santa and Jesus, then we devote the month of December to the pretense of their reality. What more can we do to prove to the world that we’re irrational and devoted to fantasy?

Lastly, we have New Years, celebrated as best I can see by consuming large quantities of alcohol and shooting guns into the air. Yee-Ha! Again we ignore the fact that days, months and years are all human inventions. We aren’t interested in celebrating the reason for calling the next 12 revolutions about our planet’s axis a new year. We just want another day off of work, a reason to get drunk and shoot guns in a highly irresponsible manner.

So I’m perfectly pleased to be leaving this pathetic season behind. This grand celebration of our silliness and foolishness. I’ve long held low expectations for the holiday season. I have yet to have those expectations not met.