it being december the second (2015 edit) FIRST, i think it's about time we went over this
if you would like to skip the nostalgic blather, look for the bold
first, some background. i am not a christian. i am vaguely pagan, and celebrate pagan holidays inasmuch as i celebrate any holidays religiously at all. even my immediate family could at best be described as culturally christian--presents at christmas, eggs at easter, and the general easiness of never wondering if our faith is gonna get us turned down for housing. i have never been a member of a church, not even in a major-holidays-only sense. i am vaguely aware that my parents hold some measure of faith, but they've never felt the need to question mine and i've returned the favor. i have the usual queer-pagan-hippie twitch response to the name "jesus" and have an extremely low tolerance for any conversation that lingers on him.
my family is large, close-knit, and adoring, and christmas, while almost entirely a secular holiday, is a Big Fucking Deal. there are a hundred-hundred tiny, vital traditions--the three-day twenty-dozen per batch cookies with each day ritualized and formalized, the visit to mother's family on christmas eve to watch my cousin and aunt come up with more elaborate gag gifts every year, christmas mornings spent munching on chocolates and nuts from our stockings and never touching a present until after a large, elaborate breakfast, the saturday-after-christmas trek to cleveland and my father's enormous, raucous, welcoming, delightful family where there are holly-shaped marshmallow treats and my aunt's candied pecans and ham and a new board game every year and sometimes, if i am very very lucky, they can be convinced to pull out their old baptist hymnals and sing the oldest songs, the best songs, the ones that combine my love of choral music and tradition and family into the peak of warmth and magic and suddenly i'm pretty okay with people going on about jesus after all, as long as it's sung.
the point i am getting at here is this
i love the lights, i love the sounds, i love the look. i love snow and holly and tiny silver bells, i love every gaudy decoration and awful, awful sweater and horrifying ribbon-and-bell bedecked antler headband. i completely, unironically adore those monstrous singing and dancing animatronic plushies that infest the department stores. i'm not kidding, i want twenty of those suckers. i love the music best of all AS LONG AS IT'S DONE RIGHT, my tolerance for bad modern covers is ZERO, and i'm told the graphic, violent threats i screech at the radio while flicking between the four local all-christmas-all-the-time stations around here hovers between hilarious and kind of alarming.
so here's where i'm going with all this:
i know i've got a fair share of pagan and jewish and atheist followers, and probably some christians as well, who are not as down with the whole holiday hoopla as i am, and in deference to them i've kept it down till it actually hit december, but the gloves are OFF, kids. i will do my best to tag everything christmas-related with #CHRISTMASBLOGGING but I AM NOT A RELIABLE TAGGER. i am way too ADHD to be a reliable tagger. so if you don't have a blacklist and/or don't want to run the risk of hitting ANYTHING christmassy, it honestly won't bother me if y'all clear out till january fifth.
(to those wondering why january fifth, i shake my head sadly and sigh, "surely all those tv marathons getting it wrong haven't convinced everyone that the 'twelve days of christmas' end on december 25th?")
