About this time of year, the same things seems to happen. Stress,
anxiety, Holiday Hostility, and the overcommercialization of what
used to be a time of family gathering and religious celebration.
Yep, you guessed it. I hate the perversion that all of that has
become.

Where I used to work, the Christmas decorations decrying Yuletide
Sales began to be displayed before Halloween was over. This
invariably led me to making wisecracks about The Great Pumpkin and
various Charlie Brown references. This invariably also led me to
be labled a troublemaker. Eh, that’s life. A curmudgeon is never
appreciated in his own time I suppose.

So, idly I’ve been watching people and things around me – trying
to figure out where the Spirit of Christmas had gotten to. Usually
I’d see that it has gone into the wallets of unscrupulous retail
outfits, but occassionally I’d see it vanish into the hands of
copyright stealing thugs. Never once did I see it transform into a
made-for-TV special, not even the stop-motion animation or the
cartoon ones.

So, I went over to a friend’s house and talked with her while we
waited for her husband to come home from work. It was getting late
and I helped her feed her baby. Yet during the entire time the kid
was being fed by her Mom, the baby kept looking at me curiously. I
guess its because the baby was used to being held by her Dad while
she was being fed and I wasn’t Dad. Then the baby got kinda fussy.
We could both tell that she was tired but was trying to stay awake
for some reason that only babies can understand. Then her Dad came
in the door. Suddenly fussy baby became Happy Baby while Dad picked
her up and played with her. Soon she was fast asleep and curled up
in Dad’s arm. It was very cute to watch.

Earlier that same day, I went to the Post Office to mail out some
books I’d sold on ebay. The line was long and the people waiting
in it all seemed to smell like feet for some reason. After about a
half-hour, the line brought me to the counter where I plopped down
my packages for shipment. The clerk looked at the return address
and asked me my name. I answered, feeling weird. Then he told me
he used to be my next door neighbor. I looked closely and definitely
saw the boy who I used to play D&D with in Middle School, except he
was a man now. We had both grown up and had met again by accident
after twenty-two years.

So in the end, I did find the Spirit of Christmas. Not in the
shopping malls or the office parties and forced comradeship of those
who’d just as soon kiss you as knife you. I found it in the love
of a baby girl for her Dad and in the friendship of someone I used
to know two decades ago who still remembered me. The Spirit of
Christmas is still out there, you just have to look for it in
places that lack advertising.

(OK, will someone now shoot me for being so sappy? Please?)