Lo, Saturnalia!

The solstice and the potlatch and the Christmas and the sun-worshiping and the Saturnalia are over and done at last. The business of America can go back to being just business, transactions for transactions sake, with the Yeshua-stuff relegated back to Sundays only, just for the hardcore. The gifts I had bought for my family came in at the buzzer; the large cardboard box arrived in the mail on December 22, the day I left Cambridge for Connecticut. Here is a picture:

Let me tell you how I really feel about the holidays; I would like to call shenanigans on the whole thing. Maybe quitting smoking and drinking contributed an extra “je ne sais pas” to my foul attitude about the holidays this year. The darkest times of the year went flying by when I was in a blackout stupor. At least that’s how I “remember” it. This year time crawled like an injured daddy-long-legs but I have held on to my stone-cold sobriety throughout. In retrospect, it does feel like an accomplishment. But there was plenty of darkness, all the way up to the break of day.

On Christmas Eve, my sister needed to do some last minute shopping. Being a good brother, I agreed to accompany her, and insisted that we go down the river to the Heart of Darkness of American commercialism, Walmart. It was totally packed and took about ten minutes just to park… Despite my repeated warnings, my sister was almost trampled on the way In because she used the Out door. Inside, people never even looked one another in the eye; instead their gaze fell only on half-empty shelf after shelf. To me, Christmas is proof that human beings are not an intelligent species… okay, I’ll hold my horses.

The best part of our Xmas Eve trip to Walmart came in the check-out line (how many of my stories involve the person at the cash register as a main character? I blame the Republicans.) Whilst my sister did pay, the bell-ringing for the Salvation Army got insanely loud. Loud enough for me to begin giggling uncontrollably as my inward-inflected negativity found a target in the external reality. I began to crane my neck trying to see the source of the high volume bell-ringing, and I began to get visibly excited. The woman at the cash register was on my level, or lower, and began to gripe loudly about the behavior of this Salvation Army bell-ringer:

“If he comes in here with that bell one more time, I’ll show him where he can ring it!” Of course I egged her on, asking questions in my outdoors voice. “He is harassing the customers! He says to them, ‘If you can afford to be shopping, you can afford to give to the Salvation Army!'” As she said these things my laughter was rising, and so was the amplitude of the bell-ringing. On the way out (this time my sister rightly used the Out door) I made sure to make eye contact with the zealous bell-ringer in his negative elf costume, and I smiled at the absurdity of it all. Walmart did not disappoint.

The irony is that in the car I had three trash bags full of clothes and immediately after this dream-like sequence I dropped off those bags at a Salvation Army donation box. Its not that I am callous human being, but rather its callousness’ opposite, my sensitivity, that is offended by the jacked up nature of the Western holidays. In the biblical Roman era, the solstice was celebrated much the same as it is now. Perhaps then its totally appropriate that the Snuggies I bought, from a TV infomercial, as my primary gifts to give out this Saturnalia, bare more than a passing resemblance to a toga.