A Christmas wish

I was in a local store about a week before Halloween looking for props for our haunted graveyard. Instead I found Christmas ornaments, Christmas wreaths, Christmas wrap, Christmas lights and, oh yes, some seasonally appropriate stuff crammed almost as an afterthought into about one aisle.

Later, on our way to church the weekend before Thanksgiving, we switched on “my” radio station to listen to “The ‘70s with Steve Goddard," which, on Steve's Web site, promised a cornucopia of Thanksgiving-themed songs…but Christmas tunes came out.

I appreciate that merchants feel they must get us psyched up for the frenzy of commercialism that occurs the day after Thanksgiving, but stumbling over boxes of Christmas garland in the aisles while looking for a plastic skeleton and having the Bee Gees pre-empted for that stupid hippopotamus song is exactly NOT the way to get me to open my wallet.

Almost out of spite I stayed home on Black Friday, but I wasn’t idle and most definitely not un-festive. After all, the Christmas season really began the midnight before, not, as stores and radio stations mistakenly believed, sometime back in October. I put on a selection of Christmas CDs (I loves me some Nat King Cole, Mannheim Steamroller, Julie Andrews and Bing) and started putting up the tree.

I untangled strands of mini-lights and hung ornaments, each of which holds some significance. Some were heirlooms while others represented a special place or adventure during which they were acquired. Fond memories, fun times, and special people and places are memorialized on my tannenbaum.

Christmas, I reminded myself as I carefully unwrapped my mom’s little ceramic Christmas angel (stamped “made in occupied Japan” on the bottom), is what each of us elects to make of it. Each of us alone has the power to make it joyous or miserable.

If we want, we can choose to be frenzied, stressed and a slave to bedazzling merchandizing.

Or, we can choose to make Christmas a time of joy, celebration and traditions. You can choose to make it a time to reflect on fond memories of loved ones and Christmases past; to pause and remember just what, exactly, we are supposed to be celebrating if only we didn’t feel an otherwise unnatural obligation to do battle at a mall to find an iPhone for a 10-year-old or else risk being a Grinch of a parent.

Will it be a time to recall and celebrate the birth of a miraculous infant two millennia ago on a cold late-spring night in a faraway manger? Or will you make it instead a time to fret because it’s your turn to host the relatives knowing all the time that cousin Petey always gets snookered and makes a bigger jackass of himself than the one Mary rode into Bethlehem?

Now for the biggest irony.

For some merchants and “my” radio station, Christmas grinds to a screeching halt at midnight on Dec. 25, ironically just when, by tradition, it is finally underway. Those “Twelve Days of Christmas” they’ve been playing ad nauseum over their Muzak systems and airways don’t actually start until the day their seemingly biggest proponents abruptly stop celebrating.

Our parents and grandparents used to celebrate all 12 days and sometimes more. They’d visit and break bread with friends, neighbors and relations (including cousin Petey, bless his heart). They played Christmas songs, lit the lights and left the tree up in the living room at least until Twelfth Night—Jan. 5—and dang it, so will I. And so can you, if you decide that’s the sort of Christmas you want.

Christmas tradition tells us the Three Kings took 12 days to get to that manger in Bethlehem. Is it too much to ask merchants and “my” radio station to allow us the opportunity to enjoy for those 12 days the fruits of our preparations that they’ve been encouraging the previous two months? I think it’s only fair to ask that they embrace as eagerly the holiday they’ve usurped and see it all the way through before they abandon it. (Until, that is, they start again next October.)