Holiday Headaches

The Times-Tribune

December 01, 2007 03:07 pm

— It looks as if the Christmas/Holiday season is getting revved up already. My calendar is more-or-less full from now until early January.
If I could just remember to write those items on the calendar, I’d be OK.
Calendar keeping is not one of my best subjects. I usually remember some things without help of the 366-day book that is designed to keep me efficient and on time.
It doesn’t work.
The only really good calendar would be some sort of electronic device that could strap to your wrist and would jolt you every time an appointment is coming up and announce just what it is, where it is and the time it takes to get there from where you are at that moment, and costs maybe $25.
All you’d have to do is push a button and announce into the microphone all the details, time, place and reason.
I’m sure that somewhere out there is a device that works just that way and costs 14 times more than an iphone.
In my younger days I kept the calendar up pretty well, but forgot to look at it every morning. Usually it was in the car and I was inside.
I’m doing mass at midnight for Christmas and the 9 a.m. Sunday mass and that’s neither the start of my list nor the end.
I think it started last night with the going over of Christmas music with the musicians.
Upcoming is the London Community Orchestra/Choir concert Sunday at 7 p.m. Dec. 8 at First Baptist in London.
The rest are boring and have no real reality, so I won’t mention them. Many are things I do weekly, or monthly, anyway.
What’s happened to us? We look toward the holiday season beginning in late January. We make all kinds of purchases, particularly from about October through December. We lose the meaning of the holidays.
The day after Hallowe’en, and the day after that, are the days we celebrate the lives of the saints.
Now the word saint means different things to different religious groups. For some it means the people who have done extraordinary things for the cause of Christianity, and others believe we just automatically become saints when we die and go to Heaven. (I’d rather think it’s the latter.)
Then the day after November 1 is All Souls Day; that’s when we remember all the dead.
Hallowe’en is simply a pagan event that grew out of some other idea but wound up the day before All Saints’ Day, thus being named All Hallows’ Evening, since it was just before what was also called All Hallows’ Day, or Hallows’ Eve, shortened as English speakers often do to Hallowe’en.
Next is Thanksgiving, which really didn’t become a national holiday until 1939 and ratified in 1941. George Washington, one of our earliest presidents, declared that annually Americans should set aside a date for Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately, football as we know it had not been invented, so George and Martha just sat on the porch at Mount Vernon and watched the wind blow the grass around.
Next is Hanukkah on Dec. 5, this year. It’s the celebration of the Miracle of Light when one day’s worth of oil for the lamps actually lit the Temple in Jerusalem for eight days after the Maccabees freed it from foreign possession and again gained control of the homeland.
Then there’s Christmas and New Year’s Day, about which we all know.
So, there’s my annual Scrooge-ness at this time of the year. I have to let all the steam and frustration off somehow. Once I’ve done that I’m OK for the rest of the year.

© MMVII, V.H. & C.K. Greene