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Happy Merry Hallothanksmas
Halloween, an occasion of insanity for which no honest pagan would ever take credit, is long over, and we are now in a season not quite as bizarre.
Having suffered weeks of debates about who offered the first thanksgiving, and where, our attention is now turned (whether or not we wish it to be turned) to the next debate, The True Meaning of Christmas.
The four weeks prior to Christmas are the Christian season of Advent. Christmas properly begins on midnight on the 24th of December and ends with the Feast of Epiphany on the 6th of January.
But perhaps we should mention Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany only in the past tense.
These Christian seasons, along with All Saints and All Souls, have long been culturally censored by the Macy’s-Amazon Continuum, and organically recycled into one long distraction, Hallothanksmas. Some call it The Christmas Season, but this is the one thing it categorically is not. Hallothanksmas begins around the first of September and concludes with the beginning of Mardi Gras on December 26.
This cobbled-together season is honored in television shows about the Proletariat camping on the concrete outside Mega-Much-Big-Box stores the size of the Colosseum in Rome. At the appointed hour the electric bells ring out and an official opens the Gates of Consumer Heaven so that The People can crash against them and each other in a blood-sacrifice combining elements of the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona and a jolly good riot between the Greens and the Blues in Constantinople.
The modern Proletariat compete not for a crown of laurel or of gold, which moths and rust consumeth, but for the everlasting honor and street cred of purchasing a made-in-China television set (in the vernacular, a “flatscreen”) much like the ones they already have, no matter how many of their fellow worshippers must be wounded and killed for it.
The old Christian seasons were predicated on the salvation story, gratitude, and good, healthy merriment; Hallothanksmas is ornamented with casualty lists.
Although Hallothanksmas is mostly about consumption, theft, and violence, it is also marked with ritual meals for the survivors during which the liturgy of the word is to share gory narratives about past and anticipated surgeries and illnesses. Turkey and dressing are just not complete without a look at everyone’s laparotomy, appendectomy, and open-heart-surgery scars and detailed accounts of the children’s latest bowel movements.
But soon all this must end with the beginning of Mardi Gras and its joyful excesses and proud public exhibitions of projectile emesis.
And let The People say “Woo! Woo!” as they bow their heads reverently before their MePhones.
-30-
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