Christmas is Almost Here

Christmas is here once again. My boys and wife love Christmas. I can’t complain. I like the festive nature around the city which starts after Thanksgiving. People string up lights and decorate their houses. Most of the displays are timid yet enjoyable. A few saps however, desperate to be showered with attention of some form, put on extravagant displays in an obsequious show of the power of Mammon. Some of them are really quite fantastic and clearly demonstrate that a great deal of thought and effort went into them. Of course with all the lamppost signs declaring, “Will put up Christmas lights” it may be the third world help making many of these look so good.

Now don’t get me wrong I like Christmas lights. They are pretty and festive and add some much needed color to the dreary monotonous repetitive visual urbanity that is Southern California. It is one of two times a year that the streets look like something other than rainbow iced cookie cutter tract housing interspersed with a few McMansion cookie cutter tracts.

So you add to this muti-colored lights and it brightens things up. I especially like the icicle lights. There is a white version which is quite tasteful and there is a deep blue version which is really pretty. The deep dark lights are symbolic, I think, of the harsh cold nights that symbolize Christmas time throughout most of the country. While many of our countrymen are blanketed in snow and biting wind we get maybe three storms throughout December.

Then you have the inflatable lawn displays which I don’t care for but my kids like. There are Santas, Bears, Santa Bears, Penguins and Santa Penguins. One of the houses in our area has a large Santa Spongebob which he displays on the second floor balcony facing the street. A nearby house similarly displays a giant Frosty the Snowman. One guy has a Santa riding a Harley which seems rather bizarre to me yet the boys like it. All of this entertainment is great. One house has a small train display in the yard. The lights on the wheels flutter giving the impression that it is moving.

The best part is that, whatever ego or cry for attention urged people to put up displays, these clowns are footing the bill for the entertainment of myself and others to cheap to put up displays. Even more humorous is that in the land of annual rolling blackouts (albeit generally in summer) people are burning electricity like it was free and infinite.

People behave strangely around the holidays. I guess after Halloween in October and Thanksgiving in November the thought of the expensive Holiday in December just pushes some people over the edge. People, always in a rush here to begin with, start acting recklessly. We went to my parents house the other day and were cut off three times in ten minutes by people rushing. In each case their sole accomplishment was to reach the stopped intersection a few seconds earlier than us. The holidays put stress on people and in Southern California, with its car culture, the response is to drive faster, more dangerously, and generally antagonize fellow motorists. It is a simple exacerbation of our already hectic lifestyle. Californians are in a perpetual race towards a red light.

This may all sound a little pessimistic but Christmas is a mixed bag. Tomorrow we’ll talk about why I do like the holiday and then on Saturday we’ll talk about how it actually went.