Only one more to go

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Only one more to go

By Micheal Boddy
Posted Monday, December 31, 2007

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For weeks it seems like I've been twiddling my thumbs. It started in late November with Thanksgiving, and will finally be over on January 2.

Perhaps if I were selling doodads and whatchamadiddles for Christmas gifts, or chili stuffed blintzes and jellied hot tamales, I might have done some good, but those are consumer items. For me to do any good at all I have to talk to the boss. They're the only ones who can do me any good and I swear many of them seem to disappear for almost a month and a half at this time of year.

Of course the holidays we celebrate now are dictated by the end of the harvest season and the coming of winter in much colder climes than ours. Times when folks for thousands of years were ready to hole up in their homely houses and knock back more than a few bowls of mead made from the fermented grain left over from the previous year's harvest.

What else could they do? It was really cold and they didn't have satellite TV.

But it's not like that here. We need our own holiday seasons not steeped in traditions from northern Europe and the land of the Yankee invaders.

As it is how do we explain to our children how to go "dashing through the snow in a one horse open sleigh?" Many of us, who don't have relatives up north and have no good reason to travel during the winter, may never again have a chance to build a "Frosty the Snowman" with our kids either. And a single "White Christmas" every 50 years or so isn't enough for us to build any local traditions.

I think we should move our five or six weeks of holidays to happen from late July through August. That's the time when we hole up and dodge the merciless heat. It's not as romantic when you're drinking iced tea in front of the air conditioner vent as it is when you're sipping hot wassail in front of the fireplace, but it has to be possible. After all the Aussies have adjusted fairly well with their shrimps on the barbies during their down under summertime Christmas holidays.

Granted, making sand angels at the beach is a lot more uncomfortable later than making snow angels, but I'm sure we're creative enough to come up with something. Perhaps we could change the words in the songs to "Dashing across the asphalt parking lot before our tennis shoes melt,” and "Rudolph the red-nosed surfer."

Then maybe I can get down to business at the end of the year, instead of just twiddling my thumbs.