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Holiday Letdown
Dec. 6th, 2005 09:09 pmI have a confession to make. For a girl born and raised Jewish, converted to Asatru, and lapsed into a fuzzy kind of semi-pagan agnosticism, I have an inordinate fondness for the Christmas Holiday Season.
I'm not really all that interested in Christmas itself, honestly. But I love the season, mostly for its feel of ritual and celebration. I love winter, and snow, and decorations with sparkly lights and tinsel and shiny baubles. I love wreaths and mulled cider and baking coookies and coffee cakes, I love shopping for presents for everyone I can think of, and I love watching other people shop for presents. I love my snowman socks, and my Merry Grinchmas scrubs. I even love the holiday music - one of my favorite holiday treats is driving around looking at Christmas lights and listening to the radio playing Christmas carols.
And here we come to my current source of sadness. Apparently this year, everyone in my neighborhood has decided to decorate their house with plain white icicle lights. Every single house that has lights up. Plain, unimaginative, boring, uninspired little white lights. I suppose it's supposed to look elegant and sophisticated, and it's nice enough when one house does it, but when that's the only holiday decoration around it ends up looking bland, soulless, and vaguely dejected. The houses themselves even seem rather apologetic about the fact that they're not properly festive and colorful.
I've always limited my personal celebration of the season to binge-baking and Generic Winter Holiday gift-giving, out of respect for the fact that it's not really my holiday. But this year I may need to go out and buy some big, gaudy, rainbow-colored flashing lights to decorate my porch, just to forcibly inject some sincere, unsophisticated cheer into my neighborhood....
I'm not really all that interested in Christmas itself, honestly. But I love the season, mostly for its feel of ritual and celebration. I love winter, and snow, and decorations with sparkly lights and tinsel and shiny baubles. I love wreaths and mulled cider and baking coookies and coffee cakes, I love shopping for presents for everyone I can think of, and I love watching other people shop for presents. I love my snowman socks, and my Merry Grinchmas scrubs. I even love the holiday music - one of my favorite holiday treats is driving around looking at Christmas lights and listening to the radio playing Christmas carols.
And here we come to my current source of sadness. Apparently this year, everyone in my neighborhood has decided to decorate their house with plain white icicle lights. Every single house that has lights up. Plain, unimaginative, boring, uninspired little white lights. I suppose it's supposed to look elegant and sophisticated, and it's nice enough when one house does it, but when that's the only holiday decoration around it ends up looking bland, soulless, and vaguely dejected. The houses themselves even seem rather apologetic about the fact that they're not properly festive and colorful.
I've always limited my personal celebration of the season to binge-baking and Generic Winter Holiday gift-giving, out of respect for the fact that it's not really my holiday. But this year I may need to go out and buy some big, gaudy, rainbow-colored flashing lights to decorate my porch, just to forcibly inject some sincere, unsophisticated cheer into my neighborhood....
