December 11, 2008

• Holiday Ups and Downs

  For starters, when I say “holiday”, I really mean about 4-5 separate holidays. So none of that bullshit about the word “holiday” replacing “Christmas”–I’ll get to that later anyhow. Oh, and, I figure after that blitz of posting in the run-up to the election, I’m still at my “one post per week” average that I set out for at the beginning of this year… at least for the last few months.

  Now then, holidays…

  Saving Thanksgiving

  Thanksgiving is my favorite non-religious holiday of the year. Think about it:

  You’re encouraged to spend time with your family It’s all about positive feelings: cheer, gratitude, etc. It’s a feast. It’s nearly impossible to commercialize. I mean, you can’t convince folks to get any more than the usual Thanksgiving fare: turkey, side dishes, pies…

  I love Thanksgiving. It’s a simple concept, and it always leaves me with a good feeling throughout the four-day weekend (and tons of leftovers). Yet, there’s one aspect of said weekend that’s just been growing worse year after year: Black Friday.

  I fucking hate Black Friday.

  I don’t use that phrase lightly. Black Friday embodies all of the worst aspects of Christmas. Don’t get me wrong–I love the spirit of generosity and good will of Christmas, and the religious aspect is all fine too. But the commercialism is horrid. Black Friday is all about convincing masses of people to cash in on apparent deals and spend more than they should. Black Friday glorifies greed and debt, masking it in phony generosity.

  And it’s taking over Thanksgiving.

  In the run-up to Thanksgiving, it was nonstop advertising about Black Friday deals, midnight shopping, pre-dawn deals… It’s turning Thanksgiving from a day of family and thanks, to the day-before-tons-of-shopping. That’s why I got so pissed off at the retailers’ commercial showing families eating Thanksgiving dinner in the parking lot of said retailer. That’s why after the Wal-Mart stampede death (link) that I got pissed at the audacity of some of the shoppers’ complaints that they’d been waiting since Thursday morning.

  It’s not the shopping itself that gets me. I don’t mind a bit of consumerism. (I even bought a few things myself that weekend–but you can bet I didn’t sacrifice any of my Thanksgiving to do so, and I sure as hell didn’t wait in any lines before stores’ openings.) I just hate how Black Friday’s come to symbolize greed and debt at the expense of one of my favorite holidays the day before.

  For the record, I spent that Thanksgiving with my family in Maryland. It was very enjoyable. And… there were a lot of pies. Everyone brought a dessert, leaving us with 9+ desserts including the pies. (…I brought two of them).

  Eid-al-Adha – Side Thoughts

  Eid-al-Adha was on December 8th this year. I didn’t do much for it–just went to prayers in the morning and took the rest of the day off. (Not like previous years, though, where I either went to Nashville or celebrated in Morocco.)

  Something amusing came to mind, though. Non-Christians I’m sure are familiar with a lot of pseudo-religious diversity. One classic example is putting up “holiday decorations” while insisting that it’s not specifically Christian or about Christmas, since anyone else is free to put up their own holiday decorations. Now, this is utter nonsense as there’s no other major holiday that regularly occurs at the same time of year*, so it’s not as if anyone else has an incentive to provide other “holiday” decorations. (And personally, I prefer that people just be frank about it and call it Christmas decoration–seriously, nobody really gets offended.)

  *(Muslim holidays are based on the lunar calendar and shift each year. Hanukkah isn’t that significant a holiday by comparison, and is mostly prominent in the West as an alternative to Christmas. Kwanzaa… isn’t a religious holiday, is less than 50 years old, is completely unfamiliar to most everyone, and anyone who celebrates that likely also celebrates Christmas.)

  Yeah, so about the “holiday decorations”. I thought that we could do some decorations for Eid-al-Adha. I mean, with Christmas, you have a nativity scene that depicts the event that Christmas commemorates: the birth of Jesus Christ. So, I figure, since Eid-al-Adha commemorates the near-sacrifice of Abraham’s son, then perhaps we can put together another scene depicting that! Come on, if anyone gets offended, we can just say “But you guys believe in the same event!”

  …well, I thought it was a pretty amusing image.

  Other Updates

  Other than all that, things have been going fine lately. I’ve been meaning to make another update about the Las Vegas trip I took a while back, but I sort of prioritized the election-related updates and put that on the back-burner for a little while. I’ll make an update about that next, before some other things towards the end of this month start coming together. KF

  • 11:37 pm
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