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Do Kim Jong-Il and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?
Some speak of an after-Christmas letdown. And perhaps it is true that all the weeks of expectations and demands and sometimes forced merriment crash down into a silence on the 26th.
But Christmas truly begins at midnight on the 24th of December and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. In the northern hemisphere our ancestors took those twelve winter days in feasting and celebration after the liturgies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The first Monday after Epiphany was Plough / Plow Monday, beginning the new agricultural year with farmers breaking up and turning over the soil in anticipation of spring.
This year Christmas Day falls on Wednesday, so most Americans must return to their metaphorical plows dark and early on Thursday morning, but maybe while wearing a nice, new coat against the cold.
More practically, the car or pickup might be wearing a new battery which will crank the engine without the need for jumper cables.
Most decorations remain up until Epiphany, which is exactly right, honoring the Infant Jesus and serving as a counterpoint against the cold, dark weather. The letdown comes when, at last, the tree and decorative angels and wise men and Disney princesses and plastic ivy and the lights, all those wonderful little lights, must be taken down and packed away until next year.
After the floor is vacuumed of pine needles (real or made in China of weird chemicals) and the furniture re-arranged, the low, grey skies outside the window remind us that winter has settled in for a long visit.
If the house is blessed with children parents are advised to wear slippers upon arising in the mornings lest their bare feet fall upon Barbie’s scepter or Ken’s sports car.
Christmas toys once engaged children – girls played with their dolls (pardon me while I dodge hashtags of outrage), boys played with their cap pistols (eeeeeek!), and living room floors and front yards were adventure lands of cars, airplanes, push-scooters, books about Robin Hood and Gene Autry and space cadets and Annette and her adventures, dump trucks, Barbie’s Dream Missouri Pacific train set, trikes, bikes, wagons, footballs, basketballs, kickballs, little green army men, little plastic cowboys and Indians, games formed up and won and lost, and occasional tears.
Christmas toys now seem to be a matter of silent, earphoned Children of the Corn staring dully and obediently into little glowing screens. What are The Voices that you can’t hear telling them?
The season of Christmas, now mostly known as after-Christmas, is good in its own quiet ways – social demands are fewer, the house is quieter, there are hidden resources of chocolate to be explored, and a good cuppa and a book by the fire is possible, where we can also meditate on the eternal verities, such as whether Kim Jon-Il and his office staff play Secret Santa.
Peace.
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