One of the truly great things about the holiday season is that it has its own continuity. In some ways, it hasn’t actually been around
eleven months since my last 31 Holi-Days
post; it has simply been “since last season”, a measure of time that isn’t
reflected on any calendar, Mayan or otherwise.
So here I am again, ready to pick back up where I left off. In the intro, I called it a sequel, but
really it’s more of a continuation after a gap necessitated by the politics of
time. I mean, you can blog about the holidays in mid-July…and you can also enjoy a
nice fall stay at Bellevue as a result of doing so.
In the real world, however, eleven months have passed. In that time, I have bid unemployment a
wonderful farewell, and really come up with a game plan for how I might also
bid low-income an equally wonderful farewell by the time next year’s Holiday
Series begins here on the blog. Rhea’s
mother’s shoulder, which had been badly broken at the end of last year’s run,
is still in the process of healing. It’s
been a long road and shall continue to be one for some time to come, but she
can once again move it in ways that were merely a pipe dream around the time of
31 Holi-Days #31. My grandmother, whose 90th
birthday party we attended the same day Rhea’s mom had her accident will be 91
this year. They don’t necessarily rent
out the big room nor hire the Richard Cheese of the senior set for 91, but it’s
still a damn good reason to celebrate.
And so on and so forth: life goes on, as has been written and
demonstrated long before I set up this little lemonade stand on the side of the
Information Super-Highway.
In some ways, it’s hard to even figure out what the holidays
might mean in the wake of the devastation left behind not very far from here by
Hurricane Sandy. As corny as this sounds,
it’s completely true: I have my family, a roof over my head, power, and no river
in my basement – and those are certainly gifts enough for anybody. To the afflicted, I hope the holidays bring
some sense of normalcy this year: as bad as things may get, Santa still flies
by like clockwork.
The more things change, the more Christmas/Chanukah/[your
holiday of choice here] looks and smells and sounds the same. We never truly solve the mystery of exactly
what’s responsible for December’s magic, and I don’t believe we’re meant to,
either. We may unravel a piece or two of
the fabric here and there – for example, I have an update on the enigmatic,
unforgettable SHARON that I’ll share at an appropriate moment later in the
series – but even then, they are duly replaced by new squares in the tapestry. This is a very excellent thing; after all, if
there were nothing new to discover about the season, there would be no need for
this continuation. And that, says the
author, would truly be a drag.
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