THE WEATHER IS NOT conducive to thinking about Christmas as we're used to thinking about it here in Maine. It's too warm and dreary, still caught up in the decay of late autumn, if this snow they say is coming amounts to anything that lasts for a while, I'll be surprised.
Global warming is a moral and emotional crisis, it's not a tragedy, it's a crime, the shame and ultimate guilt of our species, especially the affluent of our species, modern life, the crown of 18th century and later "enlightenment" that alliance of wealth, wisdom and might without any effective moral restraints, the ultimate success of entertainment and freeing the self-satisfying cynical denial and enjoyment of evil that is what happens when you choose to believe what you want and refuse to imagine the pain of those your desires hurt.
I wasn't intending to write that last paragraph when I started writing this, I was going to say that a couple of days ago I told someone I felt uncharacteristically Christmassy this year and trying to figure out why two things seemed to explain it. Those of us who had decided to divorce Christmas from giving presents and getting them in my family are increasing, getting rid of the American holiday of Stuffmas makes room for it. Another is that I and my brother cleaned out the huge hoard of Christmas crap from the basement of another one of our siblings. Including the 14 huge Rubbermaid tubs holding the damned Christmas Village that would get put up at our mother's house by her, and not taken down until one of us got asked to finally put it away. Those things take a long time to put up, they take far longer to put away in those damned boxes with their form fitting though not obvious which way, falling-apart into little balls styrofoamy protectors. I friggin' got to hate that thing. Though that wasn't all, there's no one like a family with several elementary school teachers in it for amassing Christmas crap. There's noting like getting rid of twenty boxes of that stuff to make you feel more happy with the holiday.
I wonder how much the production and disposal of Christmas crap has added to the destruction of a white Christmas. It being such a retail event, I'll bet a lot. Just the gas burned in Amazon deliveries and returns, the disposal of those returns which aren't put back on some shelf (our economic system is biocidal) must be a significant impact.
Clement Moore was a horrible person, a slave-holding hypocrite and land raper as an elite University prof. One who slammed Jefferson for political reasons for doing exactly what he did until the damnably gradualist New York abolition of slavery in 1827 forced him to stop holding Black People in slavery, twenty-eight years after the legislature passed it. He was a slave holder while he wrote that damned poem that turned St. Nicholas into a vulgar materialists' fever dream and Christmas into Stuffmas. He is recorded as having been an opponent of the abolition of slavery, even then, two decades after his (justified) attack on Jefferson. Justified by Jefferson's hypocrisy but another hypocrite doesn't get points for pointing out someone else does what he does even longer.
I've got a small number of old family Christmas stuff, enough to fit into a shoe box, that's as much as I'd ever want or need. I don't even need to put them up, just to look at them. Though I might put together a dowel Christmas tree like the one RMJ has. I've got a broken clothes drying rack I haven't fixed in years. But if I wrote out the memories those ornaments evoke in a notebook, I wouldn't even need those. Maybe I'll give them to one of my nieces, telling her about them. Then I won't need them, either. Maybe I should fix that thing.
Getting rid of Stuffmas is a really effective way to feel cheerier about Christmas, though maybe you had to have spent several hours several times putting away a commercially made, cloyingly cute, appallingly expensive Currier and Ives 3d Christmas Village to get that feeling from getting rid of it.
I might eat a couple of pieces of chocolate money, though I'd rather have a tangerine. That's enough.
Update: Oh, I remember getting Hanukkah gelt in my Christmas stocking as a kid, it's the kind of thing our mother would have enjoyed doing, she was very universalist. Probably where I got it from.
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