Christmas Traditions

 TRADITION: This piece is a sort of tradition here at The Passing Parade; I trot it out every year at this time and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed not having to think of something new to write.


There are twelve days of Christmas, and I’m sure if you’ve somehow managed to forget that fact over the course of the year retailers from one end of this our Great Republic to the other will forcibly refresh your memory for the next few weeks. Whether you want to or no, you will hear in great detail about lords leaping and laying ladies while pipers pipe and voyeuristic geese pay five gold rings just to watch. I’ve always wondered why just about every picture of Times Square before its current incarnation as Disney World North had a goose or two in the background. There were just too many of them for this to be some sort of odd ornithological coincidence.

But avian porn is not the subject of this screed, so let us move on before the police arrive. The subject of today’s lecture is the twelve days of Christmas and what they mean to me in five easy lessons. For the better part of the late and deeply unlamented twentieth century it was the fashion among a certain set of people to bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, that the demands of Mammon were stifling the essentially religious nature of the holiday, even to the point where that great philosopher and theologian Linus Van Pelt had to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about by quoting the Gospel according to Luke. Charlie Brown did not seem impressed by this argument, falling, as it did, between commercials for Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the new 1967 Ford Mustangs.

The fact of the matter is that Christmas has always been a commercial bonanza, a state of affairs that began when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that maybe Christianity wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Constantine came to this conclusion after he’d had a dream the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in which he saw a shield emblazoned with a Christian cross bearing the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES (in this sign you shall conquer). After the alarm slave went off the next morning, clocks being fairly scarce in those days, Constantine put Christian crosses on his soldiers’ shields; as the enemy army outnumbered by about four to one, Constantine figured any edge he could get was a good one; and then proceeded to march out and stomp on the competition big time.

Having won the crown in a pretty convincing fashion—Constantine didn’t have to dangle Chad over a cliff or anything—the new emperor decided to return the favor God did him and make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Once a faith exclusively practiced by the most rejected and despised elements of Roman society, the Christian faith became the most inclusive faith in the Mediterranean world since now everyone and their Uncle Bob had to join whether they wanted to or not, everyone, that is, except Constantine himself. Unlike, for example, Marshal Feng, the twentieth century Chinese warlord who converted to Methodism and then decided that his army should come to the Lord as well, and sped up his army’s salvation by having them stand in formation while he baptized them with holy water sprayed from a fire hose, Constantine chose to exempt himself from the revival, correctly figuring that if he stayed a pagan he could go on doing all the fun stuff that pagans got to do like murdering his political opponents, seizing their property, and selling their families into slavery without this sort of thing bothering his conscience all that much. If he was still a pagan, after all, who could blame him for acting like one?

Our current holiday problem started when Constantine decided that a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus would be just the thing to make himself look good on The O’Reilly Factor. There was, however, one small problem: no one knew when Jesus was born. The Gospels simply say that the birth occurred when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. This might have been enough information in the hands of a competent archivist to pinpoint a likely date, but competent archivists were hard to find in ancient Rome due to the Roman mob’s insatiable appetite for watching overweight, middle-aged clerical types with the wife, the 2.7 kids, the dog, and a thirty year mortgage on a house in the suburbs try to stab each other to death with quill pens in the Coliseum.

Constantine, having no solid information to work with, asked the Senate and the people of Rome what they thought of July 15th as the date for Christmas. The Senate and the people of Rome, mindful of the fact that Constantine had the bad habit of feeding people who disagreed with him to lions and tigers and bears, oh my, for the entertainment of the people in the cheap seats, told Constantine that July 15th was a wonderful idea. Roman retailers, on the other hand, mindful of losing the 4th of July and Bastille Day sales, told him that while his idea was wonderful, it would be even more wonderful at some other time of the year. One clever gent who owned a shoe store on the Appian Way suggested, after giving the matter some thought, that the Emperor make December 25th the date for his new holiday.

Now it was Constantine’s turn to object. At a meeting of the Imperial Chamber of Commerce, he quite rightly pointed out that December 25th was already a holiday, the feast of Invictus Sol and his brother Herschel, the inventors of the pneumatic Roman army chariot wheel and can opener, a device upon which the good fortune of the Roman Empire did not rely in the slightest. Then Constantine had the Pope read the relevant portions of the Gospel of Luke. The Pope stumbled through the text, His Holiness being unused to reading anything longer than an address; he had come to Rome to get a job in the Post Office in Gaul and wound up as Pope for lack any other available employment; and after he finished reading Constantine asked the retailers how they proposed to get around the Gospel’s clearly pointing to a summer date for Christ’s birth. After all, first century Judean shepherds did not keep flocks of sheep out on barren hillsides by night in the middle of winter just on the off chance that a passing heavenly host with some free time on their hands would wander by belting out their rendition of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in digitally remastered stereophonic sound. Clearly, December 25th did not meet the high burden of theological and historical proof required for such an august feast day.

Then someone, possibly the shoemaker who first suggested the idea of the 25th, or maybe his twin brother—no one could really tell them apart—told the Emperor something that emperors, as a class, love to hear: he was emperor, therefore he could put the holiday anywhere he felt like putting it. And so he did, on the 25th day of December, the high burden of historical and theological proof bending slightly in deference to Constantine’s need for campaign contributions; not everyone in the Roman Empire thought that Constantine’s being emperor was such a good idea and he needed money fast; armies, then and now, don’t come cheaply.

Well, over the centuries more and more days got added to Christmas; travel was slow in those days and most people had to use oxcarts that only got twelve miles to the dry gallon of oats, despite the best efforts of the ruminant companies to meet new government mileage standards. The retailers, however, loved the ever-lengthening Christmas season and did their level best to stretch the season out even more. Matters came to a head in 800 A.D., when on the first day of Christmas the Pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne discovered that he and his entourage were stuck in Rome until the end of Christmas, which occurred sometime in the middle of April. This was a major source of annoyance for Charlemagne, who wanted to go home for the holidays, and so in his third official act, the first two being an announcement that alternate side of the street parking rules were in effect and the world’s first pooper scooper law, Charlemagne decreed that Christmas would only last for twelve days.
Retailers throughout Europe objected, which seems to be a theme here, saying that a twelve day Christmas season would drive them out of business; there wasn’t enough time for the scribes to pump out advertising copy in a twelve day season. Charlemagne said, tough luck, pal, in Latin and French, and doesn't almost everything sound better in Latin and French, and then left town with the imperial crown in his luggage, as well as a couple of counterfeit Rolexes he’d bought from a Senegalese immigrant who’d set up his blanket in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The retailers, of course, did not go down without a fight. They’ve been pushing the seasonal envelope ever since Charlemagne rode Out of Town for a second place finish in the fifth race at the Roman Aqueduct. This explains why today, in our modern postindustrial information society, the official Christmas season begins with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and why we still have an annoying carol about the twelve days of Christmas. The unofficial Christmas season, of course, begins near the end of August. This may be why everyone is so happy when Christmas finally arrives—it means that we won’t hear about the damn day again for at least another eight months, something for which we should all shout, Hallelujah and Happy Holidays to all and to all, a good night!

 

PS. I actually have written something new for this blog and as soon as I type it up and do some editing, I will post it here as soon as possible.

I should, really.

I should write more here. I haven't been writing much for a while, which is just a polite way of saying I haven't been writing anything at all for a while, except for checks to pay the bills. I wish I didn't have to do that, either, but I have as yet found it impossible to find any way to get electricity for my house without paying the local utility for it.  I don't know why I haven't been writing; there are certainly plenty of things to write about these days. There's the Mueller Report, for instance, and how its release has reduced a major American political party to the level of small children who didn't get a pony for Christmas. And there is the 75th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, clearly one of the most important events of the 20th century. On the evening of 5 June 1944, German occupied Europe stretched from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. On the evening of 5 June 1945, Nazi Germany had been dead for almost a month.  Obviously something worth writing about occurred between those two dates. Or I could write about the good economic news that we never hear about because no one else wants to write about it. And then there is the possibility that robot sex slaves will take over the commercial vice industry in this country. I haven't given that last one much thought as yet, but as the market develops I think I will have to look into the matter and report on it. In the meantime, though, I think I will kick back and contemplate my choices here. I'll be back shortly....maybe.

XMAS GIFTS: If you’re a kid, this is the most wonderful time of the year (or it was when I started this piece). First, there’s the anticipation of Christmas Eve and then the joy of Christmas itself, followed by a week off where you get to play with all of your new stuff. It’s a wonderful time for adults as well. The Christmas shopping season is over until Labor Day (or is it the Fourth of July? It’s very difficult to tell anymore) and the bills haven’t come in yet and everyone gets to sit back and relax for a bit. So life, at least for the moment, is good. Of course, the gifts the adults got are nowhere as interesting as the stuff the kids got, but then that’s just the way life works, isn’t it? Adults know that there is no right jolly old elf handing out free stuff on Christmas Eve, just other adults who have to pay for the merchandise. If all this sounds like I am being philosophical about the Christmas spirit of giving, it’s because I am. This year I got a tie and twelve pairs of boxer shorts.

The tie is a very nice tie—it’s bright red with some kind of yellow design on it—but let’s face it, if a kid had gotten a tie and underwear for Christmas you’d be able to hear the screams of outrage from one end of our happy little burg to the other. Every kid knows that Santa keeps a list of who’s naughty and nice, and that according to the best evidence available he checks that list at least twice before the big giveaway on the 24th of December; the unspoken corollary to all this checking and rechecking is that if a kid has been going out of his way to be nice, the kid expects Santa to come across with some pretty damn good gifts or he can forget about the free milk and cookies next year. Kids can be remarkably unforgiving that way. They want great Christmas gifts, and ties and underwear are definitely not what kids have in mind when they come running down the stairs on Christmas morning.

When you’re an adult, of course, things are different, and I must admit that the boxer shorts intrigue me. Allow me to say here that no, I do not have an underwear fetish, for those of you filthy-minded enough to think such a thing. I do not believe that there is such a thing as a boxer fetish, in any case. Boxers are too plebian a garment to support the incredible weight of the erotic imagination, which tends to prefer the frillier foundation garments of attractive young women. The foundation garments of middle-aged men tend to be much less interesting. What makes these particular pairs of boxers interesting is their color. I now own multiple sets of dark green camouflage boxer shorts, complete with a rippled leaf effect. Other pairs feature skulls and crossbones, also with the same dark green rippled effect.

I must tell you now that I regard the sudden militarization of my underwear drawer with no small degree of trepidation. I do not know right now what my policy should be in the event these new boxers attempt to extend their control from the underwear drawer to the sock drawer or, worse yet, should they attempt a violent overthrow of my tee-shirt drawer, which may lead to a destabilization of the world underwear order and the possibility of a conflict hitherto unheard of in the annals of underwear. Appeasement does not appear to be the right policy; we all know what ultimately happens to appeasing powers when they passively face an aggressor; but nothing in the boxers’ current behavior suggests that there is any immediate cause for alarm. There is merely a vague disquiet settling over this particular chest of drawers, a troubling disquiet similar to the psychic tension that haunted Europe in the years between 1933 and 1936.

I must also tell you that I am not quite certain what the point of camouflaged underwear is in the first place. At a time when newspapers print photographs of US Marines fighting while wearing flak jackets, bathroom sandals, and IheartNY boxer shorts there would seem little need for camouflaged underwear at all, much less give several pairs to someone with as unmilitary a disposition as mine. The purpose of camouflage is, as I understand it, is concealment from people who are naturally, politically, or personally hostile to you. To achieve this admirable circumstance, nature and the world’s militaries do their best to blend into their natural surroundings. Given that underwear’s natural surroundings are under your trousers, hence the origins of the word underwear, the whole point of camouflaged boxer shorts would seem an exercise in inutility, if not just plain dumb. The wearer, of course, might choose to make use of the boxers’ camouflage effect by wearing the shorts on the outside of their pants, but this will cause chafing after a while, especially on a hot day, and the practice does tend to lead to political and social upheaval in Central America, a tragic and for most part unforeseen consequence that the American political philosopher Allen Konigsberg first pointed out in the early 1970’s.

I suppose that one could argue, and some people will, if only for the hell of it—some people are like that— that one might use camouflaged boxer shorts in order to confuse any passing sexually transmitted diseases and thereby escape their notice unscathed, but as the wearer of camouflaged boxer shorts is seldom wearing said boxers when the passing sexually transmitted diseases actually pass, this argument seems a bit weak, if not positively foolish. Many of the other proposed arguments also seem flimsy when held up to examination. The use of such underwear in deer hunting, for example, founders on some of the same reasons that limit the boxers’ military utility. Deer have little or no color vision; they cannot even see the bright orange hunting jackets the law requires hunters to wear here in the Vampire State; and they have no X-ray vision at all, rendering the point of camouflaged underwear moot. Camouflaged underwear might, in theory, be of some use in certain situations, but when such situations depart from the realm of theory and enter that of the quotidian it is almost always the result of excessive beer consumption and often concludes with some dumbass falling out of the tree their hunting stand is in (no, it wasn’t me, and no, this part of the story is not apocryphal). Now, your average American white-tailed deer is not the brightest bulb in the animal kingdom, but they are intelligent enough to know that seeing a beer sodden human being falling out of a tree in the middle of the forest is not at all a good sign, whatever the color of his boxer shorts, and that the best way to extend their chances of living to a ripe old age is to scram, split, and otherwise vamoose in as expeditious a manner as possible. The camouflaged boxers might hide our gravity challenged hunter from a crew of searching paramedics, but I think the low moans interrupted every so often with long bursts of profanity would probably negate the ripple leaf effect of the underwear. Actually, I think the swearing would be a dead giveaway, but you never can tell; stranger things have happened, you know. Did I mention that the tie is red?

TRADITION: This piece is a sort of tradition here at The Passing Parade; I trot it out every year at this time and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed not having to think of something new to write.


There are twelve days of Christmas, and I’m sure if you’ve somehow managed to forget that fact over the course of the year retailers from one end of this our Great Republic to the other will forcibly refresh your memory for the next few weeks. Whether you want to or no, you will hear in great detail about lords leaping and laying ladies while pipers pipe and voyeuristic geese pay five gold rings just to watch. I’ve always wondered why just about every picture of Times Square before its current incarnation as Disney World North had a goose or two in the background. There were just too many of them for this to be some sort of odd ornithological coincidence.

But avian porn is not the subject of this screed, so let us move on before the police arrive. The subject of today’s lecture is the twelve days of Christmas and what they mean to me in five easy lessons. For the better part of the late and deeply unlamented twentieth century it was the fashion among a certain set of people to bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, that the demands of Mammon were stifling the essentially religious nature of the holiday, even to the point where that great philosopher and theologian Linus Van Pelt had to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about by quoting the Gospel according to Luke. Charlie Brown did not seem impressed by this argument, falling, as it did, between commercials for Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the new 1967 Ford Mustangs.

The fact of the matter is that Christmas has always been a commercial bonanza, a state of affairs that began when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that maybe Christianity wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Constantine came to this conclusion after he’d had a dream the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in which he saw a shield emblazoned with a Christian cross bearing the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES (in this sign you shall conquer). After the alarm slave went off the next morning, clocks being fairly scarce in those days, Constantine put Christian crosses on his soldiers’ shields; as the enemy army outnumbered by about four to one, Constantine figured any edge he could get was a good one; and then proceeded to march out and stomp on the competition big time.

Having won the crown in a pretty convincing fashion—Constantine didn’t have to dangle Chad over a cliff or anything—the new emperor decided to return the favor God did him and make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Once a faith exclusively practiced by the most rejected and despised elements of Roman society, the Christian faith became the most inclusive faith in the Mediterranean world since now everyone and their Uncle Bob had to join whether they wanted to or not, everyone, that is, except Constantine himself. Unlike, for example, Marshal Feng, the twentieth century Chinese warlord who converted to Methodism and then decided that his army should come to the Lord as well, and sped up his army’s salvation by having them stand in formation while he baptized them with holy water sprayed from a fire hose, Constantine chose to exempt himself from the revival, correctly figuring that if he stayed a pagan he could go on doing all the fun stuff that pagans got to do like murdering his political opponents, seizing their property, and selling their families into slavery without this sort of thing bothering his conscience all that much. If he was still a pagan, after all, who could blame him for acting like one?

Our current holiday problem started when Constantine decided that a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus would be just the thing to make himself look good on The O’Reilly Factor. There was, however, one small problem: no one knew when Jesus was born. The Gospels simply say that the birth occurred when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. This might have been enough information in the hands of a competent archivist to pinpoint a likely date, but competent archivists were hard to find in ancient Rome due to the Roman mob’s insatiable appetite for watching overweight, middle-aged clerical types with the wife, the 2.7 kids, the dog, and a thirty year mortgage on a house in the suburbs try to stab each other to death with quill pens in the Coliseum.

Constantine, having no solid information to work with, asked the Senate and the people of Rome what they thought of July 15th as the date for Christmas. The Senate and the people of Rome, mindful of the fact that Constantine had the bad habit of feeding people who disagreed with him to lions and tigers and bears, oh my, for the entertainment of the people in the cheap seats, told Constantine that July 15th was a wonderful idea. Roman retailers, on the other hand, mindful of losing the 4th of July and Bastille Day sales, told him that while his idea was wonderful, it would be even more wonderful at some other time of the year. One clever gent who owned a shoe store on the Appian Way suggested, after giving the matter some thought, that the Emperor make December 25th the date for his new holiday.

Now it was Constantine’s turn to object. At a meeting of the Imperial Chamber of Commerce, he quite rightly pointed out that December 25th was already a holiday, the feast of Invictus Sol and his brother Herschel, the inventors of the pneumatic Roman army chariot wheel and can opener, a device upon which the good fortune of the Roman Empire did not rely in the slightest. Then Constantine had the Pope read the relevant portions of the Gospel of Luke. The Pope stumbled through the text, His Holiness being unused to reading anything longer than an address; he had come to Rome to get a job in the Post Office in Gaul and wound up as Pope for lack any other available employment; and after he finished reading Constantine asked the retailers how they proposed to get around the Gospel’s clearly pointing to a summer date for Christ’s birth. After all, first century Judean shepherds did not keep flocks of sheep out on barren hillsides by night in the middle of winter just on the off chance that a passing heavenly host with some free time on their hands would wander by belting out their rendition of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in digitally remastered stereophonic sound. Clearly, December 25th did not meet the high burden of theological and historical proof required for such an august feast day.

Then someone, possibly the shoemaker who first suggested the idea of the 25th, or maybe his twin brother—no one could really tell them apart—told the Emperor something that emperors, as a class, love to hear: he was emperor, therefore he could put the holiday anywhere he felt like putting it. And so he did, on the 25th day of December, the high burden of historical and theological proof bending slightly in deference to Constantine’s need for campaign contributions; not everyone in the Roman Empire thought that Constantine’s being emperor was such a good idea and he needed money fast; armies, then and now, don’t come cheaply.

Well, over the centuries more and more days got added to Christmas; travel was slow in those days and most people had to use oxcarts that only got twelve miles to the dry gallon of oats, despite the best efforts of the ruminant companies to meet new government mileage standards. The retailers, however, loved the ever-lengthening Christmas season and did their level best to stretch the season out even more. Matters came to a head in 800 A.D., when on the first day of Christmas the Pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne discovered that he and his entourage were stuck in Rome until the end of Christmas, which occurred sometime in the middle of April. This was a major source of annoyance for Charlemagne, who wanted to go home for the holidays, and so in his third official act, the first two being an announcement that alternate side of the street parking rules were in effect and the world’s first pooper scooper law, Charlemagne decreed that Christmas would only last for twelve days.
Retailers throughout Europe objected, which seems to be a theme here, saying that a twelve day Christmas season would drive them out of business; there wasn’t enough time for the scribes to pump out advertising copy in a twelve day season. Charlemagne said, tough luck, pal, in Latin and French, and doesn't almost everything sound better in Latin and French, and then left town with the imperial crown in his luggage, as well as a couple of counterfeit Rolexes he’d bought from a Senegalese immigrant who’d set up his blanket in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The retailers, of course, did not go down without a fight. They’ve been pushing the seasonal envelope ever since Charlemagne rode Out of Town for a second place finish in the fifth race at the Roman Aqueduct. This explains why today, in our modern postindustrial information society, the official Christmas season begins with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and why we still have an annoying carol about the twelve days of Christmas. The unofficial Christmas season, of course, begins near the end of August. This may be why everyone is so happy when Christmas finally arrives—it means that we won’t hear about the damn day again for at least another eight months, something for which we should all shout, Hallelujah and Happy Holidays to all and to all, a good night!

MY RIGHT THUMB: My right thumb shines. This is unusual behavior for any thumb, as I am sure you will agree, and especially for one of mine. Thumbs, as rule, do not shine, glow, phosphoresce, or otherwise give off visible radiation unless you live near an old Soviet nuclear reactor long past its expiration date, in which event your thumb will shine, glow, phosphoresce, and otherwise give off visible radiation, along with the rest of your body. But I am not radioactive, so far as I know, nor have I, at this late date in my life, taken up bioluminescence as a hobby, and even if I had, I don’t think I would start my hobbying, if there is such a word, with my right thumb. I suppose I could, but I wouldn’t. I am not sure why that is, though. The opposable thumb is, as we all know, is the foundation of our political system, any game of baseball requiring an umpire, all television programming involving the presence of Arthur Fonzarelli, and of human civilization itself. How many of the great advances in the nearly five millennia of human civilization were only possible because human beings, with their opposable thumbs, could use those thumbs to count out twenty dollar bills to the illegal aliens who actually did the work? The number is limitless, I’m sure, but it still doesn’t explain how I wound up on this tangent about thumbs and their effect on history. Just lucky, I guess.

As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, my right thumb shines. Not the whole thumb, of course—no whole thumb can shine by itself, as I mentioned above. No, a thumb can only truly shine when the individual thumb submerges its individual ego in the collective identity of the hand, something most thumbs are aware of and accounts for their fondness for totalitarian ideologies. So, as I keep mentioning without getting on with the object of the exercise, my right thumb remains its usual opaque self; only the nail shines. This is an unusual occurrence, given the latitude of our happy little burg, and one that requires some explanation beyond the torturous meanderings that constitute this essay thus far.

I drove to the local mall a few days ago, intent on going to the camera store to make an 8’ x 10’ print of the niece marching with the high school band in the homecoming parade. The mall was packed solid, this being the Christmas season, wherein Christians of all denominations go to malls throughout the length and breadth of this our Great Republic and show their devotion to Our Lord and Savior by driving themselves deeply into debt. This generally upsets the natives no end, but they continue to do it, for reasons best known to themselves and evolutionary biologists, and on more than one occasion during my trek to the camera store I had to throw myself up against the walls of this temple of Mammon in order to avoid the stampeding herds of feral Christmas shoppers that inhabit such places at this time of year. I am not sure where all these shoppers come from and it surprises me that some team of naturalists hasn’t tranquilized one or two of these malignant beasts and fitted them with radio transponders, the better to study their migratory patterns.

Eventually, after a good many twists and turns, trials and tribulations, and whatever other alliterative examples you can think of—I’ve more or less ran out of them—I reached the camera store, and there, happy to find my troubles over, I reached in my pocket for a mint. At this juncture, I should explain that I rarely go anywhere without a pocket full of mints. We all have our little quirks, I know; President Grover Cleveland, for example, was inordinately fond of corned beef and cabbage, and President Ulysses S. Grant was inordinately fond of dry, overcooked food, and President William J. Clinton was just inordinately fond, period; so if these people can have quirks, I can have one too, and my quirk is mints. I like them, I want them, and I will have them on me at all times or I will go to extraordinary lengths to get a hold of some. Fortunately, extraordinary lengths were not necessary. All I had to do was go down to the corner of the mall to a newsstand where people from the Indian subcontinent would be more than happy to sell me mints, gum, soda pop, newspapers, and lottery tickets, not necessarily in that order. So I bought three rolls of mints and headed back to the camera store, my anxieties calmed at last, when someone took me by the hand and said, come, I show you something.

You’ve probably noticed that not all the buying and selling at your local mall occurs in the stores. At our local mall, which I imagine is a fairly standard American mall right down to the six figure chunk of cash it took the owners to buy the 1984 town board elections to get the thing approved (laugh if you want to, but that’s what happened), there are any number of vendors who do not have the wherewithal to occupy a store and so must rent their little piece of the main floor. There are a good number of these folks at our mall, hawking everything from next year’s calendars to popcorn to cell phones to a stall where they will pierce your ears and then sell you ear rings to put in the ears once you’ve had them pierced. Given their precarious position in the economic food chain, these unhoused merchants tend to be a little more aggressive than the folks in the stores when it comes to peddling their wares, especially the cell phone salesmen, who either can’t or won’t get it through their heads that I am not holding out for a better deal, I just don’t want a cell phone. I see no reason in the world why I should make it easier for people I don’t want to talk to in the first place to get a hold of me. This seems a perfectly logical position to me, but the reasoning clearly eludes them and only spurs them on to greater efforts to sell me one.

None of these folks had ever tried to physically waylay me before, however, and I was about to tell this one to buzz off when she introduced herself as Aviv and she had something from the debt sea to show me. I immediately asked, the what sea, since it was still early in the Christmas season and we will not start drowning in the debt sea until January or February. She said the detsy, the lowest point on Earth, and then it struck me that the young lady was referring to the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point below sea level you can be on this planet and still be breathing without gills; the lowest point on Earth is the Marianas Trench, which is out six miles beneath the Pacific somewhere. I didn’t feel like quibbling, however; Aviv was (and is) an attractive young Israeli woman—the Israeli part I figured out from the Hebrew lettering on a water bottle, the attractive young woman part I figured out for myself without the aid of signage in any alphabet. I’m getting old, but I’m not dead yet, thank you very much. In any case, Aviv decided, on the basis of some Talmudic wisdom unknown to overweight goyish males, that what I most needed in life was nail care products, and wasn’t I lucky in that nail care products was what she was selling? You bet it was.

Now, I should mention, in the interests of full disclosure, that I don’t think about my nails very often. Nails exists, as do clavicles, for example, and that more or less sums up everything I know about nails and clavicles and everything I care to know about nails and clavicles. Given this fairly utilitarian view, it should come as a surprise to nobody that my view of good nail care is to chew them off when they get too long and spit them out on the nearest floor. Aviv was shocked as I said this, tut-tutting and shaking her head at the awful way I treated my poor innocent nails, looking at me as if I’d said that I enjoyed stomping on kittens for fun and relaxation. No, she could not allow my ignorance to stand. I had to learn the proper way to care for my nails, a process she would sell to me for $29.99, marked down from $69.99. But first, a demonstration.

She seized control of my right thumb and began massaging the nail with what looked like a small sponge. It wasn’t, of course; it was some sort of glorified sandpaper, but Aviv explained that what her sandpapery sponge was really doing was buffing my nail and restoring the circulation to the area under the nail, which has a name that I can’t think of right at this moment. The news about the circulation came as surprise to me—I hadn’t realized my nail had lost any circulation. The subscription numbers were still strong, especially in the suburbs. True, some advertising revenues were down, but I thought that was because we don’t take tobacco advertising any more. Aviv assured me that this was not the case, and that my buffing my nails with special salts from the Dead Sea would stimulate nail growth and eventually lead to a newer, better me. Ordinarily, I would have mocked such a ridiculous claim for the nonsense that it is, but it’s not everyday that an attractive young Israeli woman with masses of curly hair and a low, throaty voice massages my thumb, and so I let the claim pass. Yes, I am that shallow.

I asked if the product were safe, what with the Dead Sea being poisonous and all, and she agreed that the Dead Sea was indeed a vast pool of death where no living creature lived, but then she pointed to a picture of two men, obviously death row inmates awaiting execution, floating on the surface of this very same sea and playing a quick game of table tennis before they disintegrated into the brine. I immediately protested against this cruel and unusual form of capital punishment, but she told me not to worry about it, and so I didn’t. I put the horrible fate awaiting those two poor schnooks immediately out of my mind. Like I said, I am that shallow.

It was then that she finished sandpapering my thumbnail and put something on the nail to “protect” it. I asked what it was, and she told me, but I missed the significance of what she said until the next day, when one of my co-workers asked me why I was wearing clear nail polish on my thumb. It was at this part of the treatment that Aviv turned the charm on full blast as she coaxed me into buying her nail care products for my wife/girl friend/mother/ female relation/significant other for $29.99, marked down from $69.99, and I must admit, it took a huge pile of will power not to buy her wares then and there. So, forced with the overwhelming desire to buy something I knew I didn’t need and would never use on the one hand, and not wanting to disappoint an attractive woman on the other, I did what guys throughout the millennia have done in exactly this same situation: I extemporized, which is just a fancy way saying I started to make not very convincing excuses. I’d have to think about it, I said, there was no point in making a hasty decision about anything, even if Christmas were coming soon. She pouted, clearly expressing her displeasure with my decision and with her wasting her time on such a goy cheapskate. She implored me to think of how happy I would make someone on Christmas morning. I promised her I would, but it would take me some time to mull the matter over and come to a considered opinion, but in the mean time, I wished her a Happy Hanukkah, and she smiled broadly. You’re Jewish, she asked, and I said no, but this is New York, where even the goyim are a little bit Jewish, and then I left her, promising her once again that I would give the matter a great deal of thought and that I would let her know one way or the other before Christmas of my decision. My now extremely reflective thumbnail and I fled then before she sold me time-shares on a condo in Gaza.

So now I have a shiny thumbnail, even though I don’t really have much use for one. It’s certainly a help if I wanted to go hitchhiking, I suppose, or if I need a safety reflector on a dark night. Other than that, I’m a little hard pressed to think of what I am going to do with the thing now that I’ve got it. Maybe I should go back to the mall and ask Aviv for some ideas about that.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS...AGAIN! : Yes, boys and girls, it's time once again for the absolutely, positively, no two ways about it popular post here at The Passing Parade:the history of Christmas piece. Once again, many thanks to Kim duToit for linking to it a couple of years ago and for the swarm of folks he sent over here. Read, enjoy, have a Merry Christmas.

There are twelve days of Christmas, and I’m sure if you’ve somehow managed to forget that fact over the course of the year retailers from one end of this our Great Republic to the other will forcibly refresh your memory for the next few weeks. Whether you want to or no, you will hear in great detail about lords leaping and laying ladies while pipers pipe and voyeuristic geese pay five gold rings just to watch. I’ve always wondered why just about every picture of Times Square before its current incarnation as Disney World North had a goose or two in the background. There were just too many of them for this to be some sort of odd ornithological coincidence.

But avian porn is not the subject of this screed, so let us move on before the police arrive. The subject of today’s lecture is the twelve days of Christmas and what they mean to me in five easy lessons. For the better part of the late and deeply unlamented twentieth century it was the fashion among a certain set of people to bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, that the demands of Mammon were stifling the essentially religious nature of the holiday, even to the point where that great philosopher and theologian Linus Van Pelt had to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about by quoting the Gospel according to Luke. Charlie Brown did not seem impressed by this argument, falling, as it did, between commercials for Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the new 1967 Ford Mustangs. The fact of the matter is that Christmas has always been a commercial bonanza, a state of affairs that began when the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that maybe Christianity wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Constantine came to this conclusion after he’d had a dream the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in which he saw a shield emblazoned with a Christian cross bearing the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES (in this sign you shall conquer).

After the alarm slave went off the next morning, clocks being fairly scarce in those days, Constantine put Christian crosses on his soldiers’ shields; as the enemy army outnumbered his by about four to one, Constantine figured any edge he could get was a good one; and then proceeded to march out and stomp on the competition big time. Having won the crown in a pretty convincing fashion—Constantine didn’t have to dangle Chad over a cliff or anything—the new emperor decided to return the favor God did him and make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Once a faith exclusively practiced by the most rejected and despised elements of Roman society, the Christian faith became the most inclusive faith in the Mediterranean world since now everyone and their Uncle Bob had to join, everyone, that is, except Constantine himself. Unlike Marshal Feng, the twentieth century Chinese warlord who converted to Methodism and then decided that his troops needed Jesus as well, speeding the conversion process up by baptizing the assembled soldiery with water sprayed from a fire hose, Constantine chose to exempt himself from the revival, correctly figuring that if he stayed a pagan he could go on doing all the fun stuff that pagans got to do like murdering his political opponents, seizing their property, and selling their families into slavery without this sort of thing bothering his conscience all that much. If he was still a pagan, after all, who could blame him for acting like one?

Our current holiday problem started when Constantine decided that a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus would be just the thing to make himself look good on The O’Reilly Factor. There was, however, one small problem: no one knew when Jesus was born. The Gospels simply say that the birth occurred when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. This might have been enough information in the hands of a competent archivist to pinpoint a likely date, but competent archivists were hard to find in ancient Rome due to the Roman mob’s insatiable appetite for watching overweight, middle-aged clerical types with the wife, the 2.7 kids, the dog, and a thirty year mortgage on a house in the suburbs try to stab each other to death with quill pens in the Coliseum. Constantine, having no solid information to work with, asked the Senate and the people of Rome what they thought of July 15th as the date for Christmas. The Senate and the people of Rome, mindful of the fact that Constantine had the bad habit of feeding people who disagreed with him to lions and tigers and bears, oh my, for the edification of the people in the cheap seats, told Constantine that July 15th was a wonderful idea. Roman retailers, on the other hand, mindful of losing the 4th of July and Bastille Day sales, told him that while his idea was wonderful, it would be even more wonderful at some other time of the year. One clever gent who owned a shoe store on the Appian Way suggested, after giving the matter some thought, that the Emperor make December 25th the date for his new holiday.

Now it was Constantine’s turn to object. At a meeting of the Imperial Chamber of Commerce, he quite rightly pointed out that December 25th was already a holiday, the feast of Invictus Sol and his brother Herschel, the inventors of the pneumatic chariot wheel, upon which the good fortune of the Roman Empire did not rely in the slightest. Then Constantine had the Pope read the relevant portions of the Gospel of Luke. The Pope stumbled through the text, His Holiness being unused to reading anything longer than an address; he had come to Rome to land a post office job in Gaul and wound up as Pope for lack of any other available employment; and after he finished reading Constantine asked the retailers how they proposed to get around the Gospel’s clearly pointing to a summer date for Christ’s birth. After all, first century Judean shepherds did not keep flocks of sheep out on barren hillsides by night in the middle of winter just on the off chance that a passing heavenly host with some free time on their hands would wander by belting out their rendition of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in digitally remastered stereophonic sound. Clearly, December 25th did not meet the high burden of theological and historical proof required for such an august feast day.

Then someone, possibly the shoemaker who first suggested the idea of the 25th, or maybe his twin brother—no one could really tell them apart—told the Emperor something that emperors, as a class, love to hear: he was emperor, therefore he could put the holiday anywhere he felt like putting it. And so he did, on the 25th day of December, the high burden of historical and theological proof bending slightly in deference to Constantine’s sudden need for campaign contributions; not everyone in the Roman Empire thought that Constantine’s being emperor was such a good idea and he needed money fast; armies, then and now, don’t come cheaply. Well, over the centuries more and more days got added to Christmas; travel was slow in those days and most people had to use oxcarts that only got twelve miles to the dry gallon of oats, despite the best efforts of the ruminant companies to meet new government mileage standards. The retailers, however, loved the ever-lengthening Christmas season and did their level best to stretch the season out even more.

Matters came to a head in 800 A.D., when on the first day of Christmas the Pope crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne discovered that he and his entourage were stuck in Rome until the end of Christmas, which occurred sometime in the middle of April. This was a major source of annoyance for Charlemagne, who wanted to go home for the holidays, and so in his third official act, the first two being an announcement that alternate side of the street parking rules were in effect and the world’s first pooper scooper law, Charlemagne decreed that Christmas would only last for twelve days. Retailers throughout Europe objected, which seems to be a theme here, saying that a twelve day Christmas season would drive them out of business; there wasn’t enough time for the scribes to pump out advertising copy in a twelve day season. Charlemagne said, tough luck, pal, in Latin and French, and doesn’t almost everything sound better in Latin and French, and then left town with the imperial crown in his luggage, as well as a couple of counterfeit Rolexes he’d bought from a Senegalese immigrant who’d set up his blanket in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The retailers, of course, did not go down without a fight. They’ve been pushing the seasonal envelope ever since Charlemagne rode Out of Town for a second place finish in the fifth race at the Roman Aqueduct. This explains why today, in our modern postindustrial information society, the official Christmas season begins with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and why we still have an annoying carol about the twelve days of Christmas. The unofficial Christmas season, of course, begins near the end of August. This may be why everyone is so happy when Christmas finally arrives—it means that we won’t hear about the damn day again for at least another eight months, something for which we should all shout, Hallelujah and Happy Holidays to all and to all, a good night!