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| That's how we roll in Bridgewater, monsters. |
I'm
trying to convince friends and neighbors to go out with me and cut
down ye ole Christmas tree. I live among a bunch of heathens, people
that didn't grow up in the church. For me, Christmas is about the
gift Christ gave the world. To them it's about cheap plastic crap and forced commercial saccharine travesty. I play Sufjan
Stevens's Christmas album, wear my red scarf with the gold stars.
But
no one will go cut down balsam with me, even though there's plenty of
it out there to be cut. It's like a weed. I find myself relating to
the heathen from my past, the Druid ancestors who invented advent
traditions, of cutting down greenery to hold down the smell of their
chickens in the house. Or goats. Whatever. My research into
northeastern Europe's medieval livestock is fuzzy at best.
Why
must all of you who didn't grow up in the church be such
Christmas-poopsters? Such Scrooges? It's a good holiday. It's good
ayurvedic practice to fill your nostrils with pine for one month a
year.
Anyway.
I'm going to find a way to sneak some pine into the house, if I have
to buy it at Lowe's. It's a major local employer. At least I'll be
contributing to the economy. Investing in evergreen farming.
3 comments:
Oh, I can't imagine not having a Christmas tree! I grew up in the church, and this was such a magical time of year - not about cheap plastic crap at all (I'm sure being poor had something to do with that; but a part of me hopes not, that my parents would have still downplayed unnecessary, fleetingly pleasurable gifts even if we could have afforded them). I left the church some 25 years ago, and I still hold this time of year close to my heart.
My husband is definitely affected by the blatant commercialization of Christmas, so much so that it took our daughter's tears to move him out the door to cut down a tree a few years ago. We've been creating our own traditions, though, our little family of three -- lifting various rituals from myriad religions and belief systems and attaching personal meaning to them.
(And then the public school system undoes most of that in one fell swoop with things like an Elf on the Shelf. Mostly kidding! I think.)
Your man is sexy
Don't I know it. GQ, here we come.
But Christmas ended up great. You're so right, wcv--it's about making our own traditions. Ours for a while was an annual watching of the Steven Seagal classic "Exit Wounds" on VHS. Unfortunately this year the VCR has been relegated to beneath the trailer. We did have a real Christmas tree with LED lights and a turkey. I hope yours was just as magical.
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