ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512300007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
AS A KID in the '50s, I always looked forward to the holidays with great eagerness.
Good cheer and high spirits were undeterred by generally chilly weather. It was a time for consuming too many sweets, for paying visits on friends and neighbors - and above all, to us kids, for hauling in the loot.
And then, afterward, as our lives returned to drab routine, inevitably came the letdown.
But enough about Halloween.
The post-party depression of the moment, into which most of America and much of the rest of the world are about to slide, is the residue not of Halloween but of Christmas.
Since Monday, this depression has been held in shaky abeyance by anticipation of one last fling to come, tonight's scheduled huzzah-ing in the new year. And even that, with the graying of America, has lost a lot of its edge.
For us baby boomers, and we are legion, staying up late on New Year's Eve is turning from golden opportunity to weary challenge: Can we make it to midnight without nodding off to sleep?
For many of us first-wave boomers, getting long in tooth and creaky of joint and closing in on eligibility for membership in the American Association of Retired Persons, that transformation is already at hand. For our younger boomer siblings, it's coming soon.
Anyway, New Year's Eve and Day were always a mere coda for ending, and never the main theme of, the winter holidays.
It's about time, in other words, to get into the surly spirit of the post-holiday blahs. In that spirit, I submit the following contrarian thoughts:
nChristmas is getting less rather than more secular.
For starters, the holiday itself arose as an appropriation by the early church of the Roman Saturnalia. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christmas was accompanied by raucous carousing; the practice of celebrating the holiday in sober, reverent fashion is a product of the Protestant Reformation. The mixing of the sacred and the profane, in other words, would have to get pretty bad to sink to the historical norm.
What is getting more secular, or at least more religiously diverse, is American culture in general. On the one hand, this secular culture clings to an early-winter gift-giving, charity and partying as a centerpiece of its civil religion. But on the other hand, the Incarnation is too central to Christian theology for Christmas to go the totally secularized way of, say, Halloween and All Saints Day.
The result of this collision, it seems to me, is a fortuitously and increasingly distinct separation of the secular holiday from the religious holiday.
"Happy holidays" is becoming the generic secular greeting, a way to wish our fellow citizens well without giving offense to the millions of them who are Jews, Muslims or otherwise non-Christian. Added dollops of religious content are thereby lent the traditional "Merry Christmas." What used to be the office Christmas party is now the annual winter extravaganza, thereby removing that piece of secular celebration from the Christmas umbrella.
The Constitution, say the courts, permits governments to erect Santa statues but not Nativity scenes, unless the latter are "secularized" by a sufficiency of the former. Granted, this last Santa clause muddies the issue; all in all, though, recent constitutional considerations help reinforce the worthwhile point that the Nativity is to be regarded somewhat differently from flying reindeer.
Christmas has hardly been cleansed of all secular elements. But it's cleaner than it used to be and getting cleaner, as the secular celebration evolves into something distinct from it.
The much-lamented lengthening of the holiday season is, on balance, a good thing.
OK, OK, as my wife can verify, I'm as big a grouch as any when the Christmas - or, to be more precise, the winter-holiday - decorations start going up at Halloween, the holiday appeals for charitable donations start on Labor Day, and the shopping for Christmas next year starts on Dec. 26.
But my grouchiness is apparently the minority reaction. Most people must like decorations' going up early, else the free market's invisible hand would have stayed the display of decorations to a later date.
And if a longer holiday season puts people in a generous, giving mood for more of the year, who's to object?
That doesn't mean, of course, that I, personally, have to like it.
We do not generally learn, as adults, that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
This is because, from what I can tell, the lesson is generally learned at a tenderer age, when we're young children. The hard-core acquisitive itch seems to come along a little later, in early adolescence; we then spend the rest of our lives trying to scratch, resist, understand or otherwise control it.
The lesson less often learned until adulthood is that receiving gratefully can be more difficult than giving gracefully.
LENGTH: Medium: 94 linesby CNB