How to Save Christmas
How to Save Christmas
…when the new way is the old one
If we just throw enough scented candles, shiny wrapping paper, and nauseatingly sweet eggnog at it…maybe Christmas can be saved.
We will finally have the perfect holidays that we seem to remember from the enchanted childhoods we never had.
We long for the moment when everything is merry and bright.
When Rudolf meets the Nutcracker in the Winter Wonderland.
Where a fat man can simply be jolly, not just obese with an off-the-chart Body Mass Index, pre-diabetic, with a heart condition.
Where the little drummer boy is not being blown into a hundred bloody pieces in a remote corner of the world in a war that the rest of us have conveniently forgotten. Where our need for alcoholic self-medication is magically whisked away by the spirits of Christmas’ past, present, and future.
We put up a good struggle to hang on to our holiday dreams, but it is hard to keep up appearances. We are barraged by an onslaught of digital, audio, and paper messages urging us to make ourselves into indentured credit card slaves for high-ticket items our loved ones never knew they wanted.
We are cajoled into believing that Christmas happiness is proportional to the amount we spend on it, served up with extended mall shopping hours and express shipping by exhausted clerks too tired to worry about their children’s Christmases.
So, is there salvation from the Christmas we never asked for? The new way may be the old one, a return to simplicity. A Christmas where we give what cannot be translated into scannable barcodes or statistically added to the Gross National Product. Where we stop worshipping the GNP and embrace the GNH- the Gross National Happiness Index.
Where we understand that price and value are not synonymous.
Where we share love and compassion with each other and the world around us, showing a genuine concern for our fellow human beings, validating their lives, putting a smile on each other’s faces, and sending good thoughts to those far away.
And then…maybe for an instant, we will feel the warmth of the winter fire and hear the crystal-clear ring as an angel gets his wings.
