Can The Holiday Season Please Get Longer?

I’ve had it already with Christmas ads and music of the season. Call me a curmudgeon, but do we really need to be inundated continuously with demands to buy, buy, buy — and instructions to be of good cheer — for two months running?

  I’ve had it already with Christmas ads and music of the season.

Call me a curmudgeon, but do we really need to be inundated continuously with demands to buy, buy, buy — and instructions to be of good cheer — for two months running?

By the time December 24 rolls around, it’s anticlimactic.

The outside temperature is 70F and I mowed the lawn this week, for gawd’s sake!

We haven’t even bought our Thanksgiving turkey yet, or decided whether to stay home and enjoy the day in peace or trek on up to Chicago (Oy, vay!) to mooch off of relatives.

Actually, while I was growing up we rarely spent Thanksgiving with relatives; rather, we’d go to the home of friends who lived nearby, people with whom we made a conscious choice to associate.

I can’t remember my Mother preparing a Thanksgiving dinner — ever.

From all I have garnered during my 50+ years, Thanksgiving is not a day that should be spent with those who share one’s bloodline (beyond immediate family). That’s the point of Christmas.

We get to pick our friends, not our relatives, and, since it’s a day of “thanks,” we shouldn’t be shackled to forced commingling with people whom we moved away from years — nay, decades — ago because we really cannot stand them in the first place.

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by folks who had left extended family and unfulfilling relationships far behind; it’s obvious to understand why they had every reason to be thankful. When did a Thanksgiving gathering of extended family not devolve into a squabble or exercise in volatility?

With only one day off in the middle of a week, especially a week in which one could expect travel to be slowed to a snail’s crawl by some nasty blizzard dumped upon us as if on cue, the last place I’d choose to go is to Grandma’s house.

(Actually, I never knew either of my grandmothers. My parents met at — no kidding — the funeral of my paternal grandmother; we never saw my maternal grandmother, by all accounts a “skank” in today’s vernacular, whom my Father considered disgusting, an embodiment of iniquity to be avoided at all costs.)

The best Thanksgivings I spent with either of my ex-wives were those when we lived beyond reasonable driving distance from northern Illinois. Both of them came from families that insisted upon mandatory attendance on Thanksgiving.

Since I was expected to drive and therefore couldn’t drink, with either family it was at best comparable to daylong root canal work without procaine.

As to the first spousal unit, 12 or more of us would be crammed together into a house far too small to hold more than six people at a time. The “conversation” never varied, childhood reminiscences of the four siblings that left me sitting on my own thumbs.

With the second wife, at least the three siblings didn’t dwell entirely on their formative years. Nevertheless, I was treated as though I were a pariah.

When not being ignored, I was subjected to chastisement from my father-in-law who openly expressed his partiality toward my wife’s first husband, replete with his deep-seeded hegemony that, being of Italian descent, I had no business even living in this country. Such impudence I possessed, having the gall to marry his Anglo daughter!

Anyone who witnessed how ignominiously I was treated by the nieces and nephews would have thought that Rodney Dangerfield was the most respected man on the planet.

Thanks, my ass. Anyone with even a modicum of psychological study — or a logically functional brain — is not surprised that so many at Thanksgiving gatherings end in homicide, and why it is the kick-off for the Holiday Murder Season.

A little family togetherness goes a long way.

At least when observing the holiday on my own terms, rather than being forced to endure callous invectives from maddening relatives and in-laws, I don’t have to tolerate an endless succession of football games that mean less than nothing to me.

Now, thanks to several miracles of modern technology, I can enjoy the Macy’s parade in HiDef splendor while utilizing the DVR to zap past crap like annoying plugs for upcoming television shows, and especially those hackneyed musical numbers extracted from outrageously-priced Broadway shows that most Americans will never get to see — or want to, for that matter.

While I’m at it, what in the devil were the people at Disney thinking, releasing the latest version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” three weeks before Thanksgiving? Oh, yeah, a market needed to be created for the videogame and other assorted sundry tie-in products. (Actually, we’re heading out to the theatre to see it in newfangled 3-D as soon as I’m finished with this rant.)

Well, enjoy your turkey or ham or tofu, or whatever you indulge in on the fourth Thursday each November, and try to get along with your relations, because there’s still another month till Christmas.

O, c’mon, look at the plus side — with the world coming to an end on Winter Solstice 2012, there will only be three more Thanksgivings after this year’s…

Happy Hanukkah!

Shalom.

(Erstwhile Philosopher and former Educator Jerry Tenuto is a veteran who survived, somewhat emotionally intact, seven years in the U.S. Army. Despite a penchant for late-night revelry, he managed to earn BS and MA Degrees in Communications from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. On advice from a therapist, he continues to bang out his weekly “Out Of The Blue” feature in The Lone Star Iconoclast — providing much-needed catharsis. Jerry is also licensed to perform marriage ceremonies in 45 states.)