What’s Your Favorite Time of Year?
November 26th, 2006 |
by Glynn Wilson
The leaves are falling from the trees in heaps now.
The sun shining through the trees in the backyard still glistens off of a few splotches of burnt red, auburn and rusty gold on the hickories, maples and dogwoods.
A few robins are still coming around to take a bath in the backyard every day.
But the Thanksgiving Holiday signals a transition to one of my least favorite times of the year.
It’s not just the shorter days, or the growing cold, especially at night.
It’s not just the blatant materialistic focus of the entire American society this time of year, when the singing Santas go up in the grocery stores and the local television media folks start pumping Christmas shopping as news.
As much as anything else, it’s the bad TV programming.
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Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| Thanksgiving leaves… |
Baseball season is over. The college football season is pretty much over, except for the bowl games. And the basic cable networks start running every bad Christmas movie ever made.
Bah humbug.
If you have followed this site for any length of time, you must know by now that I am something of a crotchety old news guy who thumbs his nose at sentimentality.
The only thing I am sentimental about is freedom.
My favorite holiday of the year is the Fourth of July. Independence and liberty are worth celebrating.
Which is why I will still catch parts of Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart” even though I’ve seen it way too many times now. I will also catch “The Partriot” when it makes the late night cable schedule.
I would like to say I am not a Mel Gibson fan since he made the politically incorrect “The Passion of the Christ” a couple of years ago. But thinking back on it now, I would like to think he made that movie for the money and not to push his radical religious views on us all.
I could be wrong about that. But the point, at least for me, is that I can take greed more than I can take hypocrisy or the promotion of unreality.
So let’s just tell the truth. The Christmas holiday season is all about propping up the consumer spending segment of the economy. It’s not about Jesus.
That at least would be honest.
I don’t like the so-called “crass commercialism” either, but I can take it to some extent - even though I won’t participate in it any more than I would go out and play a character in a church Christmas show featuring a manger scene.
There are a few things I like about winter more than summer. For one, you don’t have to worry too much about being bitten by mosquitoes in the wintertime. And in the American South, there are a few decent golfing days in winter, days when you can get outside and hike.
But the best thing about winter in the South is that it only lasts a couple of months.
If I were a bear, I would sleep through winter too and look forward to waking up when the spring breaks out, when the bees and the flowers come out again.
If you are anything like me in these regards, take heart. If we can just get through the Christmas season without throwing up, and hunker down through January and February, before we know it March will be here in all its spring glory.
The birds will return from South and Central America, and we can break out the digital camera again and get some great shots.
It will warm up enough to put the canoe on top of the van again and put it in the water somewhere and run the rapids.
That is what I live for these days.
What is your favorite time of year?
What is your favorite holiday?
Why?
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Photo by Glynn Wilson |
| The leaves in the trees go red and gold this time of year… |
