Holidays and What Not

So Holidays are weird for me. Have been for a while. Some of this is because my parents have never been huge holiday-people, which means me, as growing up like an only child also was never introduced to the idea that holidays were huge. Now I have a wonderful half-sister, who I would never consider as such. She's just my sister - full blown sister, not a fractional relationship, but she's 10 years older than me so I grew up by myself. I am thankful for this. I learned to deal with myself, which has been useful in post-adolescent living.

Okay but where is this going. Here's what I'm thinking. Holidays have lost meaning because they don't have the "pull" they used to have. This actually, surprisingly, has something to do with the War on Christmas conversation, just not the way people who talk this nonsense think.

The terror that comes into the Christian's gut is not from nowhere. They are correct that we no longer live in a unified religious world. The world is "post-modern" and you are in it too - like it or not. But that world is complex and plural and most importantly it's constantly "deferred."

So Post-Modernism, as Jonathan Lethem pointed out in his wonderful essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, is more like an environment - in fact it is an environment - than it is a mode of thinking.

Here's an example - most of my understanding of other places is mediated through a screen. And then I relay my information over another screen (this one) and then someone else looks it up on their screen. Blah blah. So the point is that we're never getting to "The Real." Real go poof. What we have is the Derridian Trace.

Okay but what in the hell does this have to do with Holidays. Well in a postmodern world Christmas is constituted not by an overall sense of "being." It's constituted by a mostly capital-economic need. Not believing in Jesus or Santa Clause as being supernatural would crash our economy if the result was that people who stopped believing stopped buying.

So the holidays don't pull me in - and they didn't pull my parents in. I think they think that the world does its thing everyday. So it's more meaningful in a sense to invite friends over for a random Wednesday for a meal and talking. That has a solid center. Everyone there is there for the "event." Holidays, Christmas especially, doesn't feel unified at all. And that's what the "war on Christmas" people are correct about. They feel the fear and trembling that comes with the loss of the kind of meaning they want. What they don't get is that it's just gone - and you can kick and scream, but it aint coming back. One must dwell in the world one has. And that world is mediated and complicated and constituted by "play" and therefore wonderful. If you can accept that.

Living meaningfully in a post-modern world is the big question for our time. The fact that it's not constantly talked about shows the depth of the anxiety, in my opinion. Embrace the play. It's a lot of fun.