Idea For The Holidays

This opinion piece appeared in the Townsman, December 11 edition

Want to save money with your Christmas shopping, delight your friends and make history? Make your own Christmas card! If you think I'm kidding, put on your boots and coat and wrap a wool scarf around your neck and get into the freezing car and drive to the Woodstock Historical Society exhibit (up Comeau drive, on the right side just after the municipal parking lot). There you will see spread across four walls dozens of lovely greeting cards, some but not all created by artists well known to our area, many harking back several decades to that simpler era when all people worried about was the Depression, WWII and staring down the Russkies. It just shows you that a moment people had set aside each year to assert good will couldn't be suppressed.

While getting your materials together to make greeting cards (paper, scissors, ink) we can review how this seasonal assertion of good will got started. An obvious source is the Christian belief that "Christ's mass" celebrates the birth of Jesus. It is perhaps coincidental that the pre-Christian world had already a long tradition of celebrating the winter solstice at around the same time of year, the winter solstice being that suspenseful moment when the sun's appearance in the sky begins to gradually lengthen rather than steadily shorten. It is also perhaps coincidental that the Maccabbes' victory over Antiochus, which caused the annual celebration of Chanukah (this year beginning December 22), occurred near the time of the winter solstice. If there is a great difference between celebrating Power of Faith and the Prince of Peace, certainly there is unity in the idea of being deliriously happy that the sun won't sink under the horizon forever, especially with home heating fuel costing what it does.

Hundreds of years after the Nativity passed before the advent of the Christmas party. Charlemagne and William the Conqueror both chose Christmas Day for their coronations, perhaps starting the trend.

In 1377 King Richard II of England threw a Christmas party where twenty-eight oxen and three hundred sheep were gobbled up. Boy, I'd hate to have been the vegetarian at that table ('No thank you, just the boiled cabbage for me')! And just imagine some lady or lord with mutton dribbled all over their chops gobbing you under the mistletoe! Frankly, I think it would have been a good time to be Jewish and home lighting candles.

Some will say that George Washington showed a lack of holiday spirit by his Christmas attack on Hessian mercenaries in 1777. By this rash action the Father Of Our Country might have invented the 'party crasher,' and when your smelly, old Uncle Walford shows up unexpectedly at the door just as you're serving up the roast oxen for your Christmas party dinner, remember that he probably thinks he's only being patriotic.

The present-giving thing, when did this all start? Some will tell you it began with the Three Wise Men, Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar, presenting gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby Jesus. Despite the denial of every Chamber of Commerce in the world, most people wandering through a mall on Christmas Eve trying to find something for their smelly Uncle Walford harbor a wish that the Nativity story had been silent on this matter. Well, too late. Charlemagne and William did their best by giving a present of a big, gold crown to themselves, but the idea didn't catch on, and the Western world's Christmas season has ever since become one mass of shopping for others. If you have grown up listening to people gripe about how "commercial" Christmas has become, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1850 book "The First Christmas in New England", there's a character (smelly Uncle Walford?) griping that the Christmas spirit was "drowned in a shopping spree." Want to feel even worse? Economic analysts calculate that Christmas shopping causes a huge "deadweight loss." Dead weight loss is the difference between what the giver spent on the gift and what the gift receiver would have paid for it. Supposedly, the loss is several billions of dollars every Christmas. Well, as they say, get over it.

In case you're wondering, President Ulysses S. Grant declared Christmas a federal holiday in 1870. For those of you who enjoy a total non sequiter, Grant was 47 years old when he became president in 1869, the same age Barak Obama will be this coming January 20th. This may become relevant if President Obama decides to make October 26 a national holiday (the day the Chicago White Sox won the World Series in 2005).

Okay, you've got out your paper, scissors and inks to make Christmas cards, but don't know where to begin. Again, I urge you to visit the Woodstock Historical Society's exhibit, because you are sure to get an inspiration. (The museum will be open from noon until four pm this Saturday, December 13.) While you're at it, stroll through the village. The Guild has its annual "5 by 7" exhibit of works by local artists executed on (you guessed it) five inch by seven inch canvasses. The Woodstock Artists Association & Museum and the Fletcher Gallery are filled with tremendous works. When you are finished, be sure to notice that the shopkeepers have again done a wonderful job decorating for the holiday. Don't forget to wander off the main drag and catch the fabulous new photography show of works by Douglas Ethridge at the Galerie BMG on Tannery Brook Road.

You'll not only get great ideas for greeting cards, but you'll be reminded of what a terrific little town we have. Also, with all that money you'll be saving making your own cards you'll have a few bucks left over to get something special for that Special Someone, deadweight loss be damned. Shop local. Noel and shalom.