h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today I'm feeling grouchy. I'm not looking forward to Christmas, and people are now starting to fixate over it.

Tomorrow an Armistice Day service. It is taking place somewhere off the beaten track, so I am hoping that this means there won't be the usual parade of self-absorbed, hypocritical peacock pricks, at least. I think the usual suspects got their camera posing over and done with yesterday (in time to make the news).

On Wednesday I have do go and pretend to get trained to do something as futile and irritating as a salamander's bumhole.

But...I have hot chocolate and apple pie here. And I might fry some potatoes before that.

I don't have a TV.... so I can useually ignore the thinggymas buildup... but... just last week at William's... oh... no... the adds were just starting... then picking up.... and... today, in town.... yeh.... there are some pitiful attempts at decorations strung, badly across the streets near the center they've managed to put them up wonky, rahter than straight though.... which is... a kinda nice thing, in an odd way I'll join you in trying to pretend it doesn't exst.... for as long as possible

It's not just TV ads. For example, people start planning work Christmas dinners at the height of the summer these days. And I feel like sighing and saying "ok, I surrender, if I eat a plate of mediocre lukewarm turkey now, does it mean we can stop talking about this until the 15th of December?"

One of the many things I like about living here is how easy to avoid things Christmassy until it's virtually adjacent, especially if you don't have a television, kids, go to the mall, do much shopping other than for food and generally don't get out much.

For me that's mostly because of the climate. The weather we get here in November and December is mostly akin to a warm spring day or a mild summer's day in the UK. Mind you, Texas in November can just be like November in the UK - cold, grim and wet, or even icy (the biggest ice storm we've had since I came here happened in November), but it usually only lasts for a few days before the warmth returns, so it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security regarding Christmas.

The other main reason is that Americans are gearing up for their other big holiday celebration (after July 4th) - Thanksgiving. That's a diversion that the British don't have to take their collective mind off Christmas, so while Christmas might be in the thoughts of most Americans, they have Turkey Day, Turkey Day dinner, pumpkin pie, and the Thanksgiving Day football games to look forward to and focus on first, and Christmas isn't so prominent as it would be in the UK now.

Let me rephrase part of that...

It's easy to get lulled into a false sense of it not being autumn or winter or anywhere near Christmas.

I've had only three white xmasses. One was when I just turned 16 in West (bygod) Virginia so that wasn't anything special to the locals. But a few years ago we had a white xmass right here in Galveston County and in 2006 I was in New Orleans for my birthday and on crimbo morning it snowed.

That was quite nice.

I might have had two or three in the UK. I can only remember one for sure.

I've had quite a few white Christmasses - I love them. I loathe the early build up but I ignore it as much as I can. The Germans make a huge thing out of Advent though - so from the first of December or the first Sunday in Advent (whichever is the earlier) we are pretty much in the mood. It is not quite as commercial as the UK but it's getting there

We do have the lovely Christmas markets though, and gluehwein so it's not all bad.

I think my bah humbug sense, is growing, in recent years, mainly due to my not consuming alcohol in quite teh way I once did The whole build up to Christmas, at least in my family of virtually alcoholics, was basically a build up to utter over-indulgence in food, and, mainly alcohol... Last year, I drank two beers, in a couple of differnt pubs, over the entire Christmas time... and, really, I kinda wish I'd not bothered with them, the pubs were so dire, and atmosphere-less and I reduced the food excesses, to just the bits I like, and so that was all that was consumed food wise, and the entirity of Christmas was paid f for, for myself and William, by my bagging up, my years-worth of loose change (5 pence, 10 pence, and 20 pence pieces), seriously. It was loverly... we just had decent cheese, decent bread, a ham on the bone from the butchers, and the sausage rolls I made, and suchlike... and voided all the 'actual' Christmas nonsense This year I'm considering find finding a wooden pole, with a platorfm on top, in the fens, and just meditating and sit on it, for the entire duration folding towels seriously...

Advent is advent, though. I don't mind advent. It is a thing in its own right, with traditions of its own, rather than an interminable prolonging of Christmas.

It's not that I'm Scroogey about Christmas. I actually quite like it as a seasonal thing. But if it's dragged out too long, like every other event, it loses the sense of occasion and becomes a drag.

While I'm not "greed is good" kind of commercial materialist, I don't even mind a bit of that, and a bit of gluttony, either at Christmas. I think you need a bit of a festival in the middle of winter. It keeps you going.

I think we all like what Christmas used to be, or rather, what we think it used to be, because it was probably as commercialised during our childhoods (relatively speaking) as it is today, and yesterday I saw someone post a picture of Selfridges which they said was taken on November 5th 1955, with a sleigh pulled by reindeer running across the canopy above its doors, and urging everyone to visit Father Christmas in Toytown.

I think the major difference between then and now might be that, while it was heavily commercialised during our childhoods, its original meaning was taken more seriously and played a greater part than it does now. That aspect of Christmas seems to be a far smaller part of it today, and as such it's become more of a personal celebration and less of a cultural one, or rather a religious one.

By that, I mean that, as religiousness has declined and secularism increased, at least in some places, we've lost much of the attachment to the religious origins and meaning of Christmas, and while we might still hang on to some of the cultural traditions of wherever we happen to live (Christmas crackers, a tree, decorations, Christmas dinner/pudding etc), I think that for a lot of people nowadays they have a far weaker attachment to the serious side of Christmas.

If most the things that come with Christmas, or make Christmas what it is, have to be bought (and we derive far more meaning from consumer goods than we used to) rather than having a deeper spiritual and reflective meaning, it's inevitably going to become a commercial event. Personal or family traditions might also lose their Christmas-ness and become just another thing we do at that time of the year when people have December 25th off work for some reason, particularly if they involve consuming (the 50-gallon drum of Quality Street, the surfeit of tangerines, the box of Eat Me dates that only your dad touches).

Of course, we could go down the 'Christians hijacked the pagan midwinter feast for their own ends and those hippies celebrating the Solstice were right all long' route

The "Christians hijacked it" line is pretty common, and while there's truth in it, it's based on a misunderstanding of how things like that work. Any time two traditions, or cultures, or nations, or religions, come into contact, they run into one another like wet paints. Things mix a bit around the edges. It isn't that the Christians stole feast X, Y, or Z. But when people who believe Y adopt Christianity, they also keep elements of Y. That's just how human beliefs and cultures evolve over time and interact.

There are still a lot of old, old practices attached to Catholicism in Ireland, for example, that the Vatican would shit a brick about if they spent much time dwelling on the matter. Traditions about holy wells and cures and various things. It isn't that they were co-opted by Christianity, it's more a case of "Ok, we'll accept that bit about that fisherman from Nazereth...but if you think we're getting rid of our holy wells and the bit about the blackthorn trees you can forget the whole thing!"

Think of it in terms of cuisine rather than religion: lots of the "classic dishes" I get from the Indian takeaway are really Asian/Brit/Portuguese fusion stuff.

My take on it? There are certain things humans will do in certain situations about 95% of the time, because it's in our make-up. But we are good at telling ourselves that we are doing it for some particular reason. We "rationalise" our behaviour, and build a narrative around it.

Midwinter binge? It's the shortest day of the year/it's to remember the birth of Jesus.
Autumn bonfire/fireworks? It's to do with Guy Fawkes/Samhain/all the leaves I can put on my bonfire.
Midsummer blaze-up? It's the longest day of the year/Willam of Orange/the feast of Saint Whoever.

We can always give a very convincing reason, but the truth is usually "we are humans. We just *do* this kinda shit. "

I belong to the beautification committee for the trailer park I live in. This morning I put a couple of Veterans Day planters in front of the main office.

It's a funny thing about Veterans Day. It was established after the end of World War I, which was known as the Great War. It was celebrated on November 11, which was the date of the armistice that ended that war. Later it was renamed Veterans Day. Some of our local veterans' organizations stand on street corners selling red plastic poppies.

Now, back to the planters that I distributed: they are basically Christmas-themed, with evergreen branches, an American flag, Christmas ornaments, a big red ribbon tied in a bow, and some hard to identify red spike that may represent poppies. Yes, that time=-tested holiday representing long-wished peace has now become a gateway Christmas holiday.

Sorry! Some people may very well lecture me on rushing the Christmas season, but really I was only trying to honor the veterans using what I could find....

I have seen it said in more than one documentary, independently of each other and by people I consider noteworthy, that Christianity did a fine job of spreading itself by adapting and absorbing local traditions and festivals.

This is the bit, by the way, where I go "It's at time like this I wish I'd listened to what the people in those documentaries were saying.", you go "Why, what were they saying?" and I go "I don't know, I wasn't listening."

And as for Guy Fawkes - if the Gunpowder Plot had gone to plan, we might have been setting off fireworks any time between July and October. Or not, because it would actually have succeeded and England would have been a very different place indeed.

I like the better Christmas decorations. I have a growing collection of Tree-like replicas. I've bought three new ones this year alone: an all-glass green tree, a pine-cone & green leaves tree, and a "tree" composed of red imitation berries glued to a cone.

if we wanted to go back ton the decorations used by early Christians, we would be using pyramids. Evergreen trees didn't catch on as Christmas icons until the time of Martin Luther.

The point is that we do those things anyway. Yes, the Gunpowder Plot could have happened at some other time, but if it did, I bet we'd find some other plausible reason for bonfires in autumn. I gave you one example - leaves to burn.

We do these things in certain latitudes. That's all I know.

Bonfires and post-harvest field-burning are time-honored practices. Life is just a lot of fun with them.

One of the disadvantages to what I said above about Christmas suddenly coming around the corner because of the nice weather etc, is that by the time I realise it's Christmas it's too late to make the and give it sufficient time to mature By now I should have made it and had it sitting in the pantry for a week or two.

A time machine, a time machine, my kingdom for a time machine.