With Thanks being all safely Given and out of our public consciousness for eleven months and three weeks, another holiday takes center stage, which it has already taken, because it could.
I'm talking about Christmas! No, really! (ed. note: strike two previous sentences)
Christmas, the superpower of holidays.
At its core, Christmas is good. It grew out of a fantastic idea, a revolutionary idea -- God born as a human! God as a child? What! God as a finite, mortal being. What an idea. If you haven't considered it in a while, do so again. Boggle your mind.
Christmas is brimming with exuberance, optimism, gregariousness, charity. Christmas time moves people. Siblings spend their precious funds on siblings; strangers feed strangers in soup kitchens; poor kids receive gifts from anonymous donors who drop them off at suddenly altruistic places of business. The Christmas spirit is uplifting and real. Just look at the results.
If you're a certain brand of person, you would put your life on the line for Christmas. An edict barring the celebration of Christmas, under penalty of death, would not stop people from celebrating the holiday.
What I'm trying to say is that good people, given the right circumstances, would give their lives for Christmas. Because Christmas is capable of bringing out the best in us.
And Christmas can also be rude, or even ugly. It pokes its head where it doesn't belong, like November 3rd. Uninvited, and all. It can even make quite a mess, in spite of its good intentions: have you seen shoppers assault each other for bits of branded plastic or fur-covered batteries? If not, you've not been paying very good attention.
For the last two months of the year, the marketplace pleads for your money, with no limits on its cravenness. My God, ads on the radio urge us to buy CARS for our loved ones. There is no room for restraint at the inn.
There are not too many ways to say it: Christmas gets used. The Starbucks in which I sit does not serve a $4.75 eggnog latte to spread holiday cheer. (Hint: It's more for the crazy profit margin.) The big-box electronics store doesn't hawk its $799 TV (marked down $200!) just so you can share quality family time watching "Elf" every weekend.
And Christmas is part legend, a malleable one which gathers all kinds of mythology along the way. You think Abraham Lincoln is amazing? All he did was hold together a nation by sheer force of will. Santa delivers presents to every (deserving) kid faster than the speed of sound. And time. And light. You think it was cool when American ingenuity put a man on the moon 42 years ago? Mary's water broke at the end of a hundreds-of-miles-long donkeyback ride, then she birthed a deity in a feeding trough.
Christmas' ideals exhort us to be better. We often rise to the challenge.
Christmas is also covered in warts. If you take the time to look.
Boiling it down even further: Each year, when the calendar completes its circle, here we stand, ready to celebrate the greatest holiday on earth, because it's who we are, and without Christmas, many of us would feel a little empty, a little less significant, a little littler.
Holy Santa, America is Christmas.
