When Christmas Is Finally Over

You are left with a hollow feeling after all that relief that you pulled it off. You fight the desire to watch A Christmas Story one more time or Bing in Holiday Inn or White Christmas. The tree is beginning to lose its needles and your bank account has been hollowed out...and still you just cant quite believe its all over. And there is some loss there. A door closing on some distant past that you as an adult can only get a glimpse of a few times. Sometimes, almost never.

And it is like being a kid again. Christmas is one big look back to when you were young, Your own children experience it as a first time but for all the adults it is a well trod road that ends on December 26th and then finally when all the ornaments and decorations are packed away for the next year. And maybe it is all the old Christmas movies that does it or it is as simple as putting the brakes on our very important lives for just a day and that's when those memories move in and you remember getting a first bike or loved ones who have passed or just the simple pleasure of being in your home and feeling for once this is enough.

But it ends. And like that incredible lookback at simpler times that is most Christmas Movies it is a nostalgia trip into your own simpler, younger self that lurks behind that adult trying to get all done all the time. So you cant help but feel wistful that it all went by once again too fast and that maybe next year you can slow it down and enjoy it more, but Christmas has its own timetable and it is but once a year and so the best we can do as we leave the attic or the basement and turn off the light on all those memories is know that in twelve months we can do it all over again. 

Christmas Olympics

There is part of you that wants it all just to go away. The sheer amount of work and money to put on the Christmas holiday is nothing short of titanic. You don't want to even add up the costs and the only thing you know about the work is that there simply is not enough time to get it all in. Getting the tree and decorating are just the starting gun for the Christmas Olympics that starts Thanksgiving weekend and doesn't officially end until the New Year. And like Chevy Chase at the end of National Lampoons Christmas movie, all you can mutter at  the end is, I did it.

And yes kids up the work load. There are the mountain of presents that have to be bought. And these are not cheap gifts. You are talking high tech presents with hefty price tags. IPODS, phones, notebooks, IPADS, laptops, speakers, televisions, plasmas. Yeah ok. This might be a little over the top but not much. Throw in the XBOX's and video games and GPS and the Kindle Fire and you might as well file for bankruptcy now. Underwear and sweaters have been replaced by 4G Smart phones. The low tech Christmas simply doesn't exist anymore.

And then you have the activities. Seeing Santa. Seeing the lights. The windows, the stores, going to the parties, throwing the parties, entertaining extended family and not so extended family. Talking to the friend brought by the friend who ends up at your kitchen table because he or shes parents are in Aruba. The long lost relative who drops in and then disappears for another ten years.

But really it is time that is in shortest supply. That the money runs out is a given. What you don't have enough of is time to get it all in so the Xmas cards take a hit with seeing A Christmas Carol or going caroling or making cookies or putting up those extra lights on that one pine tree that you always said you would decorate stupidly five years ago.

Because then it just ends and you are taking down the tree and stowing the boxes and facing the long slog toward spring with a few memories and fewer dollars, as the countdown begins to the next Christmas Olympics.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Those Xmas letters we love to hate

Tis the season and the xmas letters flood into our mailbox from friends old and and new. Tis the season and the traditional Xmas card has been given a face lift with multiple Internet photos on laminate with a letter inside the old yuletide tradition of merry Christmas and Happy New Year. The photos are glanced at and the boy and girl of yesteryear are now lounging against cars and and looking more and more like mini adults. Then that letter falls out and sails to the floor.

You open the letter knowing full well what is coming. Uncle Bud got his appendix out but they are having a hell of a time with his colon and that waste bag, but he's out golfing and running in the NY Marathon next year and teaching disabled kids in the inner city in his spare time. Or Mary and John just bought another villa in France and their kids are off to Yale and Harvard and Jeremy has just finished a new procedure that will revolutionize brain surgery while Jack hacks it out in Afghanistan after turning down three offers from the NFL. Or maybe it is the hard luck story of Jim and Bernice who have been unemployed now for ten years and just lost the house but still have their faith in God even though Jim got run over by a garbage truck and an asteroid landed on Bernice on her way to the soup kitchen.

You get the drift. The question is are these cards more beneficial to the sender or the recipient? I would say the writer of these yuletide novellas receives the greatest bang for the buck. We are the unwitting readers of anothers lilfe and it is not even fiction. Like a lot of non fiction it falls into the mundane or the trivial or the self indulgent and the entertainment factor goes right out the window. This of course is right in line with the age of Facebook and our fifteen nanoseconds of fame. The only difference is you can just log off if you choose not to read someone's blatherings. Those damn letters have a way of hanging around until after New Years.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January