Outer Life

Dereligification

     I used to ignore Christmas. With no religion, a fractured family, deeply-ingrained anti-social tendencies, and a steadfast and principled opposition to gift-giving and -getting as being inefficient transfers of resources designed only to enrich the retail sector of our economy, ignoring Christmas was the only thing to do.

     Then I had kids.

     I no longer ignore Christmas. With kids, apparently, that isn’t an option. So now I tolerate visits from my fractured family, I pretend for a few days that I’m not as anti-social as I am, and I do my part to enrich the retail sector. You’ll even see some bright blinking lights hanging from the eaves of my house.

     But I draw the line at religion. I’m not going to pretend I believe something I don’t. And that poses a problem because, as anyone who’s watched the Peanuts Christmas special knows, the “true” meaning of Christmas isn’t the groovy dancing, the bright blinking lights or even the aluminum trees. No, as Linus teaches, the true meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus. And that has no meaning for me.

     So, even if I celebrate Christmas in a half-assed going-through-the-motions non-denominational kind of way, I’m still celebrating, at the most fundamental level, the birth of Jesus. That doesn’t sit right with me. Not so much because I have anything against anyone celebrating that birthday – if it makes you happy, it makes me happy – but because I feel like a hypocrite going through those motions.

     I could reject the whole religious side of Christmas, but I fear that would just force me into embracing the flipside: crass consumerism. Linus and I are of one mind there.

     Is there a third way?

     I suppose Festivus may be a solution. It is, after all, for the rest of us. But Festivus is so different from a traditional Christmas I’d need my family to play along. Substituting an aluminum Festivus pole for a Christmas tree?  Airing of the grievances? Wrestling the head of household to the ground? It has promise, but I don’t think they’ll go for it.

     I think the only way out of my bind is to work within existing Christmas traditions, but squeeze the religion out of them. So, for instance, we will have a Christmas tree and wreath, but I will tell myself those evergreens are in our house not to celebrate Jesus’s birthday, but to celebrate the return of spring at a time when everything else is brown. Similarly, we will still hang mistletoe, but any kissing that occurs will not be a celebration of Jesus, it will be a celebration of, say, fertility. And I see no reason to pull the yule log out of the fireplace. As we watch it burn, its bright warm glow will not be a reflection of Jesus’s birth, it will instead remind me that, with the recent winter solstice, these darkest of days are now getting longer, and soon we will be basking in the sun’s warmth again.

     The more I think of it, the more I think this dereligification approach has a lot of merit. Already I’m feeling much better about this holiday season. I will celebrate in silence, though, as I wouldn’t want my Christian friends thinking I was misappropriating their traditions and twisting them to my own ends. They might think that was sacrilegious, and I wouldn’t want to offend them on this, their special day.

Soul Stealers

They say some aboriginal people fear cameras, worried a photograph of them will steal their souls.

I feel the same way about advertising.

My mental space is my soul. It's me. I guard it jealously, but there's an obvious difficulty with that. Just as my body isn't a closed system, needing nourishment in order to survive, my mental space must remain open to new ideas in order to thrive.

I try to carefully regulate what gets in. Just as I don't shove my face full of junk food, I try to keep my mind clear of junk ideas.

But it's hard to resist. Junk ideas, like junk food, are crafty adversaries, designed to penetrate our defenses. They always look so good, their surface allure masking the junkiness within.

It helps to have a burly bouncer guarding your mental door, one who is impervious to glam and flash and popularity, lifting your velvet rope only for the worthy.

But that mental bouncer requires constant vigilance, a quality few, if any, have, and it can easily get overwhelmed by a crowd of gate crashers bull rushing the door, so it also helps to avoid the junk.

And that's where advertising is so insidious. It won't let us avoid it. I don't watch TV, which is, of course, riddled with ads, but increasingly I can't watch movies either, having to sit through commercials before the movie and product placements once it starts. I can't drive down the street without ads hitting me from billboards, bus benches, buses and cabs. I can no longer attend concerts or sporting events without having to resist constant pitches from the "sponsors" who make it all possible. They've even put ads on the walls of my office building's parking garage, and on screens installed in our elevators. I keep my head down to avoid it all, which is why they've started putting ads on the floor of our supermarkets.

And, what's worse, ads are perhaps the most effective mental space invaders ever designed. Crafted by experts, they sing catchy jingles, they show strategic jiggles, they scream and joke and criticize and brag and cajole and give us puppy dog eyes, exploiting our weaknesses over and over and over until they've worn us down enough for them to barge in and burrow deep, setting up shop and crowding out our thoughts.

So you could say I fear ads, worried that each one I see or hear steals a bit of my soul.