Don’t Forget– Wall Street is Counting on You– the “Average American Consumer” — to Spend Yo Dollas! This Holiday Season Here in America! (The world’s Eden, Inc.) ((this is what Christmas is about, remember? Spend dammit))
But really, what if you told all of your family and friends that you wouldn’t be accepting or giving gifts this year? Could they still celebrate without the ritual of black Friday and all of its implications? Perhaps they’ll call you cheap, a bitter Scrooge.
Or, maybe, secretly, will be relieved – not to accept the onus of the exchange. Maybe they don’t need anymore crap, but still add the item to an erstwhile list of things to be treasured in turn and with effort, as a token of sentiment from one beloved.
Maybe they know that what ever they could wrap up and put in a box for you is not your heart’s desire. They know you will feel excitement while unwrapping the present and disappointment when it is revealed because tangible form never quite meets the ideal swimming within the unbounded mind. Even if Santa delivers faithfully his recipient will be filled with only brief deflating joy before the sudden emptiness of the unwrapped present is manifest.
….He realized, that the fun of the chase is never in the catch, and that the weaving lines and holiday spirit of endless fluorescent aisles in checkout lines are little more than the thrill a dog knows when he’s after his own tail.
Christmas is all the excitement of an orgasm that fizzles only in the promised moment of release.
Picture cold; the coldest you’ve ever been, when it hurts to move, the darkness of winter nights in constancy which blot out the sun – no heaters, no electricity to stave off the night or the cold. Many whom you know will not survive to see spring, the end of a frozen land and the grip of ice from which shelter provides little respite and few hospitalities. Food does not grow and there is no refrigerator to stash it away, no chex mix in sealed bags and no twenty four hour taco drive through . Nothing, but rationed scraps of a good harvest, the same small bounty each waning day and waxing night.
Cold, frozen, starving, in the dark – this is the context in which we should understand Christmas. The state of our ancient ancestors – the triumph of the human spirit in a ritual that defied the quintessence of winter: dead and black and cold – upon this alter man rejoiced in song and danced upon pillars of naked flame to welcome the coming of Spring. On the darkest night of the year’s darkest day, did man see himself in the eye of his brother, and loved all men as he loved himself. And only then the light was born.
Transcending all doctrines or dogma does this symbol slumber within the consciousness of humankind. Here is the present I cannot give you. Christmas, the unwrapped hidden force and form, sterilized and anesthetized in sealed plastic, barcode blindfolds cannot contain it when it is given to the self and then to another and another gives it to…
Cyberouroboros 