Christmas Nostalgia

Being an old geezer (okay, well at least half an hold geezer), it sometimes takes a while for the feeling of Christmas to kick in. And I'm not talking about the good feeling of doing good things for other people. Yeah, I know that that should be the focus, and I do try to do that. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the feeling of looking forward to getting fun stuff and getting time off of school/work for a while while you enjoy it. But there are a few things that can instantly trigger nostalgia about Christmas. Maybe they're weird, but whatever. Here they are in chronological order:

• Music from whatever records we listened to as kids. I think Perry Como and Bing Crosby or something.
• Certain types of cookies and chocolate candy, although I can't put my finger on exactly what
• In theory, old-style Transformers would do this. But I haven't seen one in a long time.
• Mega Man 3. This was probably my most-anticipated Christmas present ever, and something about the pre-Christmas-morning vibe made me think I wasn't going to get it. But I did! The music from this game is just epicly legendarily awesome.
• Mentos. The smell/taste of these are directly tied to playing Mega Man 3 at Christmas time, because that's when I first had them.
• Bomberman 64. There was one Christmas when Nintendo didn't have any good new games out, so I got the closest thing I could find to Mario 64 (as far as I could tell). The superhappy Green Garden music feels especially Christmasy, although the snowy White Mountain music does too.
• Metroid Prime. I was skeptical about whether you could make a good first-person Metroid game, but they did it! The quiet music from Phendrana Drifts (the snowy area) is especially wintery.

And... nothing else comes to mind. I guess the older you get, the more the seasons blur together, and I guess once you can buy your own stuff you don't rely on Christmas in quite the same way for cool stuff and experiences. But that's okay, because there's usually enough nostalgia in the above things to keep me going.

Bonus question: 

Since "Phendana" is a completely made-up word, why didn't they just spell it with an F?

The Christmas [Blank] - 2012

My wife and I were going to skip the Christmas story tradition this year since our new baby has kept us pretty busy, but my brother wrote one, so I went ahead and added one too. My sister also contributed a story, increasing the range from “silly to weird” to more like “silly to pretty messed-up”. Also, I reformatted the ebook version so the text isn’t part of the pictures, and so that the pictures are small enough to allow a few more years’ worth of stories before I hit the Smashwords size limit on the file.

You can get the free e-book in various formats from here:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/124476

The Christmas [Blank]

You know how there are a zillion Christmas movies, books, and TV specials with titles like “The Christmas” plus something else? It occurred to the authors that the formulas used in these stories could probably be applied – or shattered – using just about any noun in a title like that. So we came up with a new tradition.

The rules are simple:

1. Open a Christmas book and point to a random spot on a random page.
2. Scan along the text until you come to a noun.
3. Write that story.

So a few of us did this last December, and I finally have them formatted and published as a free e-book.

This collection currently contains three entries:
* The Christmas File: a pseudo-romantic pseudo-drama
* The Christmas Hamburger: a children's story
* The Christmas Head: A brilliantly weird picture book... I don't know how else to describe it.

Humbug – but not really

It’s a well-known fact that we commercialize holidays and spend a lot more time thinking about how to celebrate them than what they’re supposed to commemorate. That’s probably a bad thing in most cases, but I have a bit of self-justification that I’d like to offer the world. And I have a proposal for how to deal with this. Read on.

My Perspective

First, about Christmas. The point of Christmas is very important, probably second only to Easter. But consider something you always hear at Christmas time: “We should keep the spirit of Christmas all year.” And what spirit is that? The Spirit of Christ, of course. Putting it that way makes it easy to see how to commemorate the birth, life, and mission of the Savior all year. Pray. Study the scriptures. Attend church. Be good to people, and be willing to sacrifice to help them once in a while. That won’t preserve the festive feeling, but then again, does the festiveness of Christmas come from the religious origin? Not really. It comes from traditions – traditions that people made up.

So here’s my self-justification: I claim that as long as you are doing the stuff that God has asked us to do to remember Him on a daily and weekly basis, it’s not the end of the world if you also spend time with non-religious traditions, even if they happen to coincide with a holiday. (After all, the only “holiday” that God has actually asked us to observe [following the Resurrection of course] is the Sabbath.)

To take that a step further, consider what happens when Christmas traditions come into conflict with divinely-appointed traditions. Say Christmas falls on a Sunday. Do you cut short religious activity so you can observe mortal-made traditions? This applies to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as well, which brings us to…

My Proposal

I say we should reschedule our holidays to be more convenient, and to clearly separate the meaning of the day (if any) from the traditions around it. Specifically, here are the changes I propose:

• Christmas

It is well-known that the date of December 25th has no particular meaning in Christianity. The Romans decided to celebrate Christmas on that day because it helped pagans blend the message of Christ with their current beliefs. Does this make Christmas a pagan holiday? Of course not. Nobody goes out and worships Roman deities on Christmas (or at all, for that matter). I mention this merely to point out that the date is flexible.

The other thing I want to point out is that, for a student, any time between the start of winter break and Christmas Day is essentially wasted, because you can’t play with the stuff you get. I think we could solve both this and the commercialization issues by making Christmas the Monday of the last full week of December. That way, Christmas Eve would always be on a Sunday and would therefore get extra religious focus. Also, if you believe in avoiding shopping on the Sabbath, you’d get the stress of mall work out of the way in advance. Then you’d open presents and stuff on Monday and have at least a full week to enjoy them before the year ends and you have to worry about school. You’d be embracing the commercial traditions on Monday, but only after spending what I think would be extra time remembering the real meaning of the holiday the day before.

• Mother’s Day / Father’s Day

So this one won’t apply if you don’t choose to restrict what you do on Sunday, but I think it’s pretty inconvenient that these holidays fall on Sunday. You’re trying to celebrate motherhood, but meanwhile you’re trying to get the kids to church, you can’t go out to eat, etc. There’s not much time left to focus on the mom. These holidays should be on Saturdays instead.

• Halloween

If there’s anyone who attaches any religious meaning to Halloween, I haven’t met them. If anything, it seems to have turned into a worship of evil in a lot of contexts. But as far as the fun, cute side of it goes, why would you ever want to have it on on a week night? If it always fell on a Friday night, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting to bed on time and stuff like that.

Of course, it has been pointed out to me that you might have fewer trouble makers if it were always on a week night. But it should be a fixed day of the week. (Again, Halloween on Sunday is lame.)