Final Christmas reflections

I know Christmas is over and whether one is nay or yea (or huh) on the Holiday, I'm pretty sure everyone is ready to dust off their hands and move on. But because today is still a related holiday we have a brief moment to gather ourselves and reflect, what with it being Boxing Day and everything.

Holy crap, wait a second. It's Boxing Day?

It's Boxing Day!!!!


Wait here please, I have to go dispense presents to my servants! I'll be right back.








Oh, I forgot. I don't have any servants.

How embarrassing.

And this is America. So even if I were rich and had servants I couldn't call them "servants", I'd have to call them something else, like "employees", or "Hey you, what's your face", or "The United States Senate". So I probably wouldn't have to get them anything in a box anyway. 

I'm afraid I just panicked. 


So, having long been a fan of Christmas, here is what I learned this year about Christmas:


I'm not that big a fan of Christmas itself. Christmastime, yes, but I'm not a fan of Christmas Day.

Oh, we don't particularly celebrate Christmas at my house. And as far as the day, it really  was a lovely, cozy sort of day. My wonderful wife and I went for a fascinating, longish walk through neighborhoods so unnaturally quiet that it was like the Rapture came. So it was a nice day, but as a holiday it was nothing to me. It was mostly sad, and only more so for being the last day of a joyful string of days off.

I love Christmas season: The lights, the music, the bubbly shopping mall spirit, The Peanuts, rampant consumerism, snow and cookies, Scrooge, good will, Santa. But Christmas, actual Christmas Day is the end of all that. It's all the things I don't like: Family Dinner, traditional foods, piety, disappointing presents, and Baby Jesus in a Manger. 

Yuck.



Christmas is brilliant except for Christmas Day. Christmas Day is just the funeral for the Christmas Season, grim, formal, dead. 

May it rest in peace.