As promised, via YouTube, Barack Obama's speech yesterday:
From everything else I've seen Obama seems a bit conservative for my tastes, and therefore wouldn't be my first choice as President, but all in all I have no major objections to him, and this speech certainly garners major tolerance points.
That's from here, of course. What else would I quote upon this day?
The Christmas dinner plate. Turkey covering yon sage and onion (and mushroom and sausage) stuffing, turnip, roast potatoes, ham, Brussels sprouts... it's going to amount to a fine bubble and squeak tomorrow. I'm particularly pleased that I've gotten Round One of the washing up done already.
And here's the pudding!
There never was such a pudding. And the eggnog, oh, the eggnog. I'm just glad we were able to use a tiny bit of the liquor we'd gotten from Mom's house...
Ten years ago, the portion of the American viewing public that still watched the sitcom Seinfeld learned about a made-up holiday called Festivus. I had long since given up on Seinfeld, when the characters just got too mean and pointless for me to enjoy. I know I watched some '90s sitcoms, but nothing with slavish regularity. I can't recall ever being able to sit through an entire episode of Friends. And I was naive enough to believe that, as our entertainment choices grew exponentially with the advent of home computers and videogames and so on, the number of people who actually paid attention to these shows was relatively small. So I never cultivated the cultural vocabulary that included Ross and Rachel, or Uncle Jesse, or the ability to answer any of these questions. And I never heard of Festivus until a few years ago, when it seemed to be everyone's favorite in-joke.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on the made-up day, which is supposedly celebrated every December 23. I feel a little less duped finding out that Festivus was actually created by the father of a Seinfeld writer, not by the show itself. And while I can appreciate the inherent silliness of the concept, and the satire it presents of a culture obsessed with celebrating something, anything to mark the passing of a year and the rebirth of the sun/lengthening of the day, I admit to being a little disturbed at how easily folks have latched onto something everyone acknowledges is fake and meaningless and invested it with actual significance (if only by the act of giving it attention in the first place).
Is this how other rituals and "holy days" come into being? Kwanzaa didn't exist when I was born. It was a celebration wholly created from scratch, using symbols and rites invested with meaning by the people who made it up. Just like Festivus. And just like Christmas, or Eid-al-Adha, or Unduwap Poya, or Chanukah, or Saturnalia, or Hogwatch. Even an essentially secular celebration like Festivus contains the meaning we give it, and that meaning makes the day sacred to those who mark it.
My fellow ComicMixer John Ostrander's review of various televised versions of A Christmas Carol reminds me that it's probably past time to link once again, as I do every year, to my "wholly trinity" of Christmas-related media culture essays:
Happy Chanukah! I just now lit the first candle, as my last day of training at the office left me fairly wiped and Robin's deadline did much the same to him. So we went out for our anniversary dinner (we got married nine years ago today, and I see where the 9th is the Leather Anniversary which pleases him greatly as that means I can buy him another levvuh jacket) then came home and collapsed, and I've only just gotten up again. I can't believe I forgot where to place the candle before lighting it. This game helped. I had to (virtually) go to Berlin to find it, but there you are. Tomorrow I make latkes, if I can rouse myself from bed. It'll be good to sleep in again, particularly since I have plans to go into Manhattan for four days in a row after that (hope the weather warms up a tad)...
from Elayne @ Pen-Elayne on the Web 21 Jan 2008 1:18 pm
