{"id":415,"date":"2008-12-11T17:17:14","date_gmt":"2008-12-12T01:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/415"},"modified":"2008-12-11T17:17:14","modified_gmt":"2008-12-12T01:17:14","slug":"its-beginning-to-feel-nothing-like-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/415","title":{"rendered":"It’s Beginning to Feel Nothing Like Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Money roasting on an open fire. Bad news nipping at your nose. Blind optimism being sung by a choir. And folks as poor as Eskimos.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the financial news, though, and the steamrolling depression that\u2019s engulfed America. It just plain doesn\u2019t feel like December.<\/p>\n

Sure, there\u2019s word that Americans have decreased their debt for the first time in history<\/a>. Really. The first time ever<\/i> that Americans\u2019 total individual debt has gone down.<\/p>\n

While that\u2019s the headline, isn\u2019t it more disturbing that debt is 25% of total American net worth? Or that while debt declined by 0.8%, net worth declined by 4.7%, meaning that debt functionally increased greatly as an overall portion of the bottom line? Who came up with this system, anyway? How did we get here?<\/p>\n

This is not my beautiful house.<\/p>\n

Maybe the problem is that I\u2019m in California. Not just California where the newspaper<\/a> ran a headline with the word \u201cArmageddon\u201d in it today about the state budget crisis. But a part of California where it never truly gets cold (or warm), where it never snows, where it never feels like anything except, as I\u2019ve long described the weather here \u201ca little crappy\u201d. If I were somewhere where the weather artificially inflated my Christmas spirit, like Buffalo or something, then I might be all set. It\u2019s like reverse-light therapy. Snow as savior.<\/p>\n

But somehow, I think that would be hollow and artificial. I think I would just be writing a post about how I could physically see<\/i> Christmas and it felt physically<\/i> like Christmas, but the soul was missing. It\u2019s like everyone woke up in August and said \u201cHey, let\u2019s have Christmas now!\u201d And because no one rejects suggestions by the right people or the right publicity, we just did it. And with none of the feeling or verve or resonance, we just put on the show, flew home, and went through the motions.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 I\u2019m delighted to go home for a vacation that I\u2019ve been counting down by the half-day. And maybe Nuevo\u2019s cold and luminarias will save my spirit.<\/p>\n

You also shouldn\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 this is far greater than my standard ambivalence about Christmas as a non-Christian and a non-child. Those categories both put a decent layer of resistance to the ol\u2019 spirit around me, but I\u2019ve become well accustomed to not being a Christian (15 years) and not being a child (what, 11 years, I guess?).<\/p>\n

This is different.<\/p>\n

I even, for the third straight Christmas, work in an agency positively obsessed with Christmas and the spirit. Everywhere, everyone is preparing for the next big holiday helping, be it food, toys, or fellowship. It\u2019s all most anyone can talk about or think about.<\/p>\n

And maybe it\u2019s my extra removal from clients (and kids) this year over last, but I think there\u2019s something deeper. Something deeper even than the bottom line of a nation on life support in a power outage. Deeper magic from before the dawn of time.<\/p>\n

You know what they say about all winter and no Christmas. One-hundred years of winter and all that. We\u2019re going to need an awfully big groundhog to turn this around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Money roasting on an open fire. Bad news nipping at your nose. Blind optimism being sung by a choir. And folks as poor as Eskimos. It\u2019s not just the financial news, though, and the steamrolling depression that\u2019s engulfed America. It just plain doesn\u2019t feel like December. Sure, there\u2019s word that Americans have decreased their debt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-day-in-the-life","tag-a-day-in-the-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}