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Perhaps I'm succumbing to a nostalgia attack, but it
seems that the Christmas features in newspapers and
magazines used to be rather upbeat and cheerful, along the
lines of Trimming Your Tree.
Now you see headlines like these: Suicide Rate Climbs
During Holidays.
The Office Christmas Party: Stay in
Control and Climb the Corporate Ladder by Stepping on Those
Fools Who Drink One Too Many and Insult Someone
Important.
Holiday Stress Syndrome Linked to Cancer
and Heartburn, but Researchers Say Catatonic Meditation
Offers Certain Relief.
Fight Seasonal Affective
Depression with Hawaiian Shirts and Old Beach Boys
Tunes.
This loss of Christmas cheer may be a by-product of an
aging population. As my Dad says, You know when you're
an adult because that's when you quit looking forward to
Christmas, and you start looking forward to it being
over.
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Christmas. Of course I coveted a pile of presents, but I also learned that there are times when it is indeed more blessed to give than to receive.
Every year, there was a food drive in Evans. We were asked to bring canned food to our grade school. Some benevolent organization would then distribute the cans to the needy, so they would not go hungry on Christmas Day.
I looked forward to that because then my brothers and I could ransack my mother's cupboards. We looked hardest for cans of red beets, but we would settle for canned spinach or canned brussels sprouts.
I was filled with joy of all sorts when I eagerly chucked a can of Kuner's red beets into the poor box. Since other kids did pretty much the same thing, the needy of Evans must have gagged on their Christmas dinners.
Although there has been a lot of hand-wringing about the
homeless lately, much of that implies that the
homeless
are somehow very different from the rest of
us.
However, the statistics show that the average American family is about four months away from being homeless. If you lose your job, that's how long your savings will last until you're forced to move into your car, or if that gets repossessed too, to join the other unfortunates who sleep under a bridge. You'll get to enjoy good meals twice a year, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, the two days America has a conscience.
Perhaps that's why the holidays don't seem so cheerful
any more. You can read about food drives, and you can even
donate -- perhaps even something that tastes good. And then
you can read about Olestra,
a wonderful new product
from the kitchens of American industry.
Olestra is an indigestible fat. Once it comes to market,
you'll be able to gorge on doughnuts and potato chips
without putting on weight. Aren't you just thrilled that on
a planet where people are starving to death, our scientists
have perfected a substance which looks and tastes like
food, but has no nutritional effect? It recalls one of
those old moralizing Decline of the Roman Empire
epics, where the degenerate aristocrats gorged at a
bacchanal, and excused themselves at intervals to force
themselves to vomit, so they could come back and indulge
some more.
Olestra may never make it to the market. But you can see much the same thing with a drive to the mountains. You'll see shacks that people live in year-round. On the hillside, you'll see 4,000-square-foot palaces that are inhabited for perhaps three weeks out of the year; they're empty the rest of the time. In Colorado, we've made an industry out of building and selling those extravagances.
Perhaps we had no choice. But that's probably why
depression
is the first word we associate with
holidays
now. It is depressing when you realize that
the Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol,
is just a
story.
In the real world, even Ebenezer Scrooge might have been generous to the Cratchits on Christmas Day. But the next day, Scrooge would jet off to his luxurious second home on the ski slopes. He'd pig out on tasty morsels that wouldn't make him fat, even as Mrs. Cratchit searched for a recipe that used left-over red beets. And Scrooge would not be trouble by ghosts. He did his annual bit of charity. Those specters wouldn't dare disturb him; he paid plenty for his alpine vacation hideaway.
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