Jack Knox
Slightly Skewed
A few post-Christmas observations:
A) Even if you've been waiting years for the roadblock cop to phrase the question just right, never reply to "Anything to drink tonight?" with "Thanks, I'll have a beer!"
B) Dogs won't eat brussels sprouts, they just lick off the gravy.
C) Having watched the Sound Of Music for the 314th consecutive year, it finally occurs that Captain Von Trapp is an Austrian naval officer. Austria is landlocked. Being an Austrian naval officer is like being an Iranian liquor inspector, or owning a comedy club in Alberta.
D) This is the real holiday week, the one where you finally get to relax.
The time between Boxing Day and New Year's is for melting into the couch.
Presents have been opened. Turkey has been swallowed. Overworked credit cards no longer feel like molten lava. Everybody* is back sleeping in their own beds (*might not apply to Tiger Woods). We're all infused with a warm glow, and will be until the scotch/Prozac wears off.
Good lord, but people seemed inordinately stressed this year. Dunno why.
It's not as though the traditional triggers - too little money, too much of everything else - were being squeezed any tighter than usual. We overspent and overindulged, but always do.
Plenty of people blame the rise in tension on the decline of belief, which itself is blamed on a toxic marriage of corporate ideology and soulless bureaucracy that treats any hint of spirituality like, well, a fart in church.
Retail chains and schools have expunged the meaning of Christmas, or Winter Happiness Festival, or whatever they call it, from the store and classroom.
Done in the name of protecting the rights of those who didn't know they needed protecting, this has had the opposite effect of offending the great mass of people who are appalled by the notion of Big Brother chasing Christ out of Christmas at gunpoint.
This outrage is felt despite the fact that most of the counter-offended people A) haven't themselves been to church or temple since somebody died or got married, B) couldn't recognize a single scripture not recited by Linus to Charlie Brown and C) lost their own faith shortly after their virginity.
Did you say grace at Christmas dinner? Did you feel a bit self-conscious if you did? Or did you just use the opportunity to slip brussels sprouts to the dog?
Whatever. The overall effect has been to leave Christmas as a primarily social/commercial enterprise without the leavening (and here I apologize to those offended by the use of the vaguely Biblical "leavening") influence of the underlying message of peace and goodwill.
News sites are crammed with tips on how to deal with Christmas stress.
Britain's National Trust suggested people calm themselves by strolling through the forest and staring at the trees. An Australian psychologist compared Christmas stress to road rage. "How to avoid a post-Christmas Day heart attack" read the headline in the New York Daily News. The general theme is that Christmas is like Protestant sex -- something to be endured, not enjoyed.
All these stories solemnly exhort us to spend less time in the mall and more with family.
Sure. Which one? Driving on Boxing Day, I came across what at first glance appeared to be a series of roadside drug deals, but were in fact hand-offs of children being ping-ponged between former spouses. Even in traditional nuclear families, the politics of who spends what time with whom can be more complicated than an Irish poet. The Korean border has less tension.
Then there's the pressure to come up with an appropriate present. "I love it," she says. "It's the best gift ever. Did you keep the receipt?"
Then she wonders if it's possible to dearly love someone while also wanting to stuff his head in a toilet, if only for a little while. When it comes to gifts it's not so much the thought that counts, but the lack thereof.
Which brings us to this week when, having tiptoed through the social minefield, Canadians are left to relax on the couch, wondering how they'll get through 2011 on one foot.
