Hold Your Reindeer!

There are so very many major events to celebrate in December.  We have Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Boxing Day.  You may choose instead to devote your celebratory energies and theme your home's decor around National Flashlight Day (Dec. 21), National Bicarbonate of Soda Day (Dec. 30) or the birthday of the longest tenured host of Television's Tic-Tac Dough, Wink Martindale (Dec. 4).


Regardless of what you choose to celebrate some time during the next month, one must recognize that Christmas is the most hyped of all these holidays, pseudo- or legitimate.  I know this because upon a visit to the bookstore the day after Halloween, the shelves in the children's section were cleared of all things spooky and scary to make room for all things red, green and snow-flakey.  I had not yet finished having horror movie fueled dreams about hacking my way through zombie hoards on my way to raid the long-abandoned grocery store's shelves of canned goods in order to sustain my bunkered family and already the ends of every aisle were adorned with fake snow and jingle bells instead of cobwebs.  Seventy-two hours later, one of the local FM stations (the one that normally plays the light hits of the eighties, nineties and today!) had converted to nothing but Christmas music.


Quick tangent: I love the Beatles and can acknowledge that Paul McCartney made some decent music after their disassembly, but his song Wonderful Christmastime is possibly one of the worst songs ever.  It makes me want to stab sharpened candy canes deep into my inner ear in order to prevent hearing any more of the song.  Moving on...


I find this premature shift of holiday gears unsettling.  While it should come as no surprise that I am a big fan of capitalism (earning and spending really gets my motor going) and I fully recognize the huge role Christmas has come to play in sustaining said massively successful economic system, I think that there is a proper way to celebrate what Andy Williams so aptly crooned to be, "The most wonderful time of the year," and that technique involves holding off until the day after Thanksgiving to begin your yuletide preparations.


Should you get into Christmas mode immediately after Halloween, you are committing over 14% of the entire year to the celebration of Christmas.  That's too much for any holiday.  We here at Transformer Generation Dad impose a strict 10% limit on how much of the year should be dedicated to any one event. You do the math.  That should give you more than enough days to wring all possible enjoyment out of any holiday.  Seriously, you do the math because, frankly, we aren't so good at it.


So go ahead and prepare all you want for the celebration of the enactment of the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed Prohibition (Dec. 5...we'll drink to that) and which also happens to coincide with the birthday of everyone's favorite allegedly anti-semetic innovator of animation, Walt Disney (again, Dec. 5, though those celebrating Hanukkah may be less enthusiastic about it).  You may even decide to be all dark and moody and begin celebrating the year pre-anniversary to the end of the world per the Aztec calendar (Dec. 21).  I don't care, as long as you don't start until November 25th.


Besides, starting any sooner takes away from the splendor of Thanksgiving.  Anyone who loves the overindulgence of Christmas can certainly appreciate the overeating and watching of football on giant television screens (probably purchased during the previous year's Christmas sales).  Why not celebrate the Twenty-First Amendment a bit sooner and throw some booze into the Thanksgiving mix.  Just a suggestion.


Ooh!  Thirty-six and a half days!  We just figured it out.