Christmas, The Semi-Holiday

I love Christmas. I really do!.......Well, I sort of love Christmas.

"Christmas has become so commercial" "It's just another day" " Christmas is for little kids"

Take your pick. I'm sure you have heard one of these phrases or maybe all of them. And they are all true and all wrong. When we were children Christmas time seemed to be the most magical time of the whole year. We would spend hours going through toy catalogs and browsing through the small toy ailes in the department stores making up our wish list to send to Santa. What free time we had in school was spent making Christmas decorations, singing carols, and practicing for the Christmas play. 30 ten year olds vainly attempting to sing on key and remember the words at the same time.

Then the big night finally arrived, CHRISTMAS EVE! There was always family dinners and visiting your parent's friend's homes. The smell of pine trees being dried out by 200 degree Christmas lights filled the air, slowly mixing with the smell of Black Label Beer as Dean Martin sang Christmas Blues on the Hi-Fi.
Eventually you would go home, Head buzzing from too much Christmas candy and the couple swallows of beer that your dad would sneak to you before your mom saw and gave him hell. And some how you would fall asleep. Now any other morning you would sleep till late in the day if your parents didn't threaten you to get out of bed, but on Christmas morning there is a special and seldom used alarm button in kids heads that would bring them out of a sound sugar coma at the crack of dawn.

And so you would start your rampage through layers of gift wrap and yards of ribbon to find your treasures. All morning you would play with your new toys as your parents exchanged their gifts. The same gifts they had told each other they didn't need and didn't expect. After you ate and dressed you would grab this years favorite toy and climb into the back of the car to visit the grandparents and family where if you were lucky you would open more presents, though grandparents never seemed to get the idea that Christmas gifts should be fun....not practical.

After a long day you would goto bed happy and exhausted. For the next week or so you would play with your new toys and visit the neighbor kids and see what Santa had brought them. Finally you went back to school and did the same thing with your friends.

Now, where is all this going your probably wondering? Well the fact is that Christmas as an adult SUCKS! And WE are the ones that make it that way! We kill ourselves working like mad to make the extra money we think we need to buy presents. We spend every spare minute at the mall up to and including Christmas Eve. On Christmas day if you are a male and the Dad of the family. You are elected to be the toy version of General Motors. You cut apart & assemble hundreds of small plastic pieces while following a set of instructions that were translated from Chinese and a lot was lost in the translation. And then there are the damn decals! Hundreds of them! I swear if I ever meet a graphic designer from Mattel I am so going to kick his ass!
The 26th you go back to work or if you are really unlucky to return things to the store. And Going to the mall is just what you want to do after spending the last 24 days there.

Possibly one of the most irritating Christmas carols ever written is the 12 Days of Christmas. But there is a lesson to be learned here. The world that the song describes is several hundred years ago and they would at that time celebrate Christmas for 12 days. Think about this. 12 days when you could relax and talk to your friends and family. 12 days to slow down and take stock of your life as you head into a new year. 12 days to say thanks to God for allowing you to make it through the past year and to ask him for a little guidance in the next year.

12 Days. Isn't that what we did when we were children? Maybe the magic isn't all gone. Maybe in our instant access, minute rice world we forgot that Christmas magic just takes a little more time.
Merry Christmas!!