Random Chaos

Appropriate Wintertime Jubilations: A holiday greeting, once purely tongue-in-cheek, that a friend currently serving the country came up with when it was realized that the usual group contained three different flavors of Christian, a Daoist, a couple of agnostics, one atheist, at least three pagans, and a black chick who actually acknowledged the newest of the holiday seasonal festivities.

The fact of the matter is, saying “Merry Christmas,” while traditional, can be a bit exclusionist. No other faith has its holidays so publicly acknowledged—well, excepting Hanukkah, and we have Adam Sandler to thank for that. The above greeting began as a kind of hipster PC greeting—and somewhere along the way my little group started taking it fairly seriously.

A few fairly horrendous things have happened this year, to me as well as other parts of the country (Hell, I feel like my trouble is small potatoes to some of the things that are going on), and any holiday greeting seems to feel a little bit forced as long as you have no idea that something horrendous has happened to someone else. The nation reels from mass killings and a war that we’ve all been tired of for half a decade; I’m still battling that bothersome thing in my head that goes by an acronym that, when read as printed, sounds like a rim shot. (Seriously, actually pronounce ‘PTSD’ and tell me it doesn’t sound like a rim shot.)

However, a bit of Pagan!perspective helps me to remember what this season means (besides cold feet, warm cocoa and entirely too much food). As originally observed, the general temporal area we’re in right now is a chance to observe the triumph of the light over dark; the year wanes, but the light waxes, and we prepare for the veritable explosion of life that awaits the warming of the land. This light is not just a literal light: the sensation also ties to the body, as anyone suffering from seasonal-affective can tell you—we feel good when there is more light. …well, most of us. I’ve been battling a migraine that has me literally recoiling when I sense light. ANYWHO, the point is that when the light returns, we can be like the green sector of our planet’s life—renew and rejuvenate while the days lengthen. With this sort of thing going through my head, it’s easy to forget atrocities like the shootings and the utterly reprehensible things that a man of god can spout about a TINY segment of the population.

I wish Appropriate Wintertime Jubilations on all, now.

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