And Steve Vai plays Christmas Time is Here from the Peanuts

For some reason, it doesn't feel like Christmas time.

Blame the righteous holiday avengers, the one's who hound the very ideal that Christmas should be micromanaged in culture to include all respective holiday revelries (you know, the reason you can't say "Merry Christmas" but only "Happy Holidays" and the like), but I don't think that's why the holiday feels so out of touch this year. As someone who has never been part of the Christian faith, I celebrate Christmas on a societal level. I grew up celebrating the holiday; it's surrounded December like a waft of pine trees and cinnamon, and I never questioned the validity of my celebrations in respect to Saint Nicholas's wonderworks. I just woke up on the 25th to find sun shining through the windows, presents under the tree, and, inevitably, no one else awake quite yet. Anticipation always woke up me around 6am, quivering with the understanding that Santa wrote me a note thanking me for milk and cookies (I never noticed how much his scrawl looked like my mothers). So, ever since my non-religious awakening and the understanding that Christmas comes from the celebration of Jesus's birth, I still celebrate and buy gifts and decorate and listen to the music. It's not religious, it was the norm of the society in which I grew up, and I still want to celebrate that spirit.

This is why I feel ludicrous being asked to shuffle my holiday responses to normal celebrations. I would much rather cater to your specific holiday than waft over everything with a seasonal "Happy Holidays." It's a minor part of the retrograde, preferring "Happy Hanukkah," "Merry Kwanzaa," or "Blessed Winter Solstice" to the entirely impersonal "Happy Holidays." Doesn't that just promote ignorance rather than respect? Aren't you deliberately taking any meaning out of the words by generalizing the season so bluntly?

None of this is the reason it doesn't feel like Christmas. It's just poetic liberty.

We went driving to a neighborhood last night called "Christmas Card Lane." All the houses are dressed up in their thematic revels and they ooze Xmas Spirit. We drove there thinking this would incite some sort of Christmas riot within ourselves and suddenly the benevolence would shoot forth in candy cane rainbows and sugar plum parades. Even with Burl Ives blaring from the radio...it felt crowded and uncomfortable and when it ended there was no profound understanding of "this is what Christmas is all about," there was just "okay, so, how do I get back to the freeway from here?"

Christmas has gone missing. That intricate spirit that wades in the shadows of Thanksgiving waiting to jump into the snow machines of Southern California so we can play in the false nurturing of a fabricated holiday. But I suppose that's the problem...this year it feels fabricated. It feels false and pressured and obligatory rather than a relentless slew of warm memories and old friends. There's distance and dissidence to the spirit of Christmas, which prevails a false celebration. Musing about the societal nature of Xmas without spending much time in the throws of the society kind of limits perspective. Spending so much time avoiding crowds, entertaining individualistic activities, trying to force the spectacle of Xmas has diminished it's social value which is the whole argument I was making about the understanding of Christmas as a social tradition, and not a religious one.

Time to find the celebrations without confines. You can't force Christmas, but you can find it.