Soggy leaves, the remnants of fall, tread water by storm sewers at the side of the road and glisten in the green and red glow of Christmas lights sneaking up around the neighborhood. The aura of the most festive season of the year is upon us. Department stores have dusted off their Christmas decorations as the last of the Halloween goodies were swept out the front door. One major holiday event melding into the next. I shake my head and attempt to keep up with the disappearing year. Where does the time go?
There are the ambitious few who began their Christmas shopping during the Boxing Day sales of 1995, and are probably wrapped up and ready for the annual blitz. Then there are the few who will wait for the last minute marks-downs to ease their holiday budgets and do their present wrapping on Christmas Eve.
The rest of us will forge through the holiday shopping hours during the next few weeks, contemplating and choosing gifts for those closest to us. We are the market at which the advertising campaigns are aimed, the reason that each commercial break on television is filled with catchy tunes and slogans to grab our hard-earned dollars.
The commercialized Christmas season we all complain about, is upon us.
Christmas has become a major marketing campaign, but the effect it has within our household is entirely up to us. Elementary school teachers throughout the province are preparing projects that entail hours within classrooms to produce; hand crafted gifts destined for appreciative recipients. Many of the colorful, and often gaudy, ornaments find their way into china cupboards to be displayed beside Royal Dalton figurines and Bohemian crystal. Pensioners on tight budgets are wildly knitting or nailing together crafts with aged and loving hands – hours of precious time woven into each piece. These are the true gifts of Christmas, gifts of thought and time. The gifts of Christmases past.
It is the generation in between – the over-taxed, over-worked and over-tired – that is destined for the mall. The sandwich generation. We are perhaps to blame for the high profile of the pre-packaged and plastic Christmas of the nineties.
As I shake my head, wondering where time has gone, it has occurred to me that perhaps I should be looking at the time at hand. Maybe it’s time to take a backwards glance to when life was less complicated and an action-packed afternoon had nothing to do with the latest action hero. To a time when kitchens were dusty with flour and filled with the aroma of warm gingerbread cookies and fruitcakes. Memories rich in texture, aging with the full-bodied flavor of a fine red wine. The passage of traditions through generations, unique to every family, changing only in their yearly markers. In beyond the tinsel and glitz they are still there, marking the celebration of a special time of year – a time for family, for giving and for fun.
Christmas in the nineties; plastic, perhaps; commercialized, certainly. But always special, always memorable.