Stretching Out the Holidays

A friend posted the following on Facebook:” I love all my FB friends, but those of you who already have your Christmas decorations up are making me feel even further behind than I did before. I don't even have all my fall decorations out yet.”That’s my story. I used to have really cute Halloween decorations, including ceramic pumpkins with my son’s names as teeth (created during my ceramic period), but I never managed to get them out until a day or two before Halloween. Sometimes I wonder if I was adopted – I certainly didn’t inherit the holiday decorating gene from my mother, who, even at age ninety, puts a red, white and blue bow in the flowers for the Fourth of July.

Wait a minute on the Christmas decorations. Isn’t there a rule that we can’t put Christmas trees up before Thanksgiving? That’s right up there with the “no white shoes before Memorial Day” decree. I know retailers have to prepare ahead of the season, but I’m just not ready to hear “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” every time I turn on the radio.

Our current cultural climate stretches holidays out for weeks on end, which worked out great for the lovely Madelyn Simone. Instead of wearing her Little Red Riding Hood costume once, she got to escape the Big Bad Wolf at the grocery store, in her Mee-Maw’s neighborhood, in her neighborhood, and skipping down Main Street here in Ashland at the Costume Capers. If she lived a bit closer to us, we would have done the Monster Mash, (the Halloween movie night sponsored by Main Street Ashland), Tuffy’s party at Ashland University, the Pumpkin Parade at the Ashland Kroc Center, and trick-or-treat in our neighborhood. A candy-loving kid could be set for life!

Does stretching out the celebration threaten to dilute the specialness of the holiday itself? Not that Halloween is quite the commemorative event as is Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day, but my memories of a childhood Halloween have a sense of one-day uniqueness to them: counting down the days in anticipation, assembling the costume, trekking down the block to knock on the doors of neighbors (only those with their porch lights on), inhaling the scent of scorched pumpkin, and dividing up of the goods on the living room floor, sneaking the Good and Plenty out of my little brother’s pile when he wasn’t looking.

As this idea whirls and swirls through my mind, it leads me to ponder – how did we get from a night of trick-or-treating to a season of Halloween happenings? And, moving ahead to December, how did we get from a baby in the manger to a holiday season that seemingly jumps right over Thanksgiving’s turkeys to the barking dogs singing Jingle Bells? I don’t think there’s a cosmic social planner with a five-year strategic plan to increase our holiday participation by 10%. Life just happens, right?

Ah, that’s the challenge, isn’t it? Contrary to popular opinion, we can choose to put some parameters around our own holiday celebrations. Looking ahead to Christmas (only 45 shopping days away), we can refuse to watch A Christmas Story more than once this year, even during its twenty-four hour Christmas Eve marathon – fa-ra-ra-ra-ra. We can choose gifts for those we love that won’t bankrupt us, or we can splurge on a dream gift just because we can. We can reach out to the other side of the railroad tracks or across an ocean, with an angel tree gift for a little one in our own community or with a shoebox stuffed with goodies for Operation Christmas Child. We can gather with others of our faith traditions, and we can sit alone in the darkness of a winter evening, light a candle and say a prayer.

There’s no Christmas tree for us yet, but I am anticipating the joys of Thanksgiving and the excitement of Christmas, especially with a three-year-old in the mix. And after all is said and done, I’m following Andy Rooney’s advice: “One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don't clean it up too quickly.”