I was back home in West Allis putting up my mom’s Christmas tree. I had finished stringing the lights when I noticed that they didn’t seem to be as bright as last year. A chill came over me as I vaguely recalled throwing out a string when I took down the tree last January and making a mental note to self to pick up a new one. For me, mental notes to self aren’t worth the neurons they’re printed on.
My mom, my wife and I stood there for a moment, looking at the tree. I said, “So, who wants to say, ‘Dave, this tree looks fine. There’s no need for you to go out and get another string of lights?’”
My mother said, “The nearest Walgreens is at 60th and Oklahoma.”
I drove there and found the shelf with the Christmas lights. There were strings of white ones, but the Cieslewicz family has always been a multi-colored-light family. They did have those new nets of multi-colored bulbs that you use to drape over bushes, but they don’t work for indoor trees. Finally, I noticed a little sign advertising 50 percent savings on strings of multi-colored lights, but there were none left. Gone. Sold out.
I muttered something under my breath that was not, “Peace on Earth. Good will toward men.” And I drove off to the CVS at the River Bend Shopping Center a mile away. There I found a really fine selection of strings of bulbs of all colors and varieties. I even found strings of only 20 lights indicating to me that there was a new trend toward tiny trees, probably standing on sad kitchen tables where lonely people eat store-bought Christmas cookies and stare at sterile cards sent by real estate agents and insurance companies and their congressman.
I pulled myself out of my short-string-of-lights-induced holiday depression and picked up three boxes of those on the theory that I needed maximum flexibility. I didn’t know if 20 would be enough or 60 would be too many, but now I had options.
Happy with my find, if not its implications for society, I got in line. A couple of people in front of me was an old guy who was chatting up the clerk. He was apparently a regular and she knew how to humor him. I thought that maybe he was a lonely guy who only needed 20 lights for his Christmas tree and that the CVS clerk was his only human contact for the day. My heart was on its way to going out to him when it snapped back inside my chest with a thud as he said to the clerk, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! None of this ‘Happy Holidays’ bullshit!”
I was determined that when I got up to the counter I was going to say, “Happy Kwanzaa! Happy Ramadan! Happy Chanukah! Happy Solstice! And while I’m at it, Feliz freakin’ Navidad, you xenophobic moron!”
But of course by the time I got to the counter Mr. Christmas was gone and the clerk, well, she was just doing her job. So I paid for my lights and said, “Thanks, have a nice day,” like it was July.
It used to be that, “Happy Holidays,” was the way you avoided offending anyone. Now you can start World War III by saying that. How is it that people, who call themselves Christians, have ended up celebrating the birth of a man who taught them to love their enemies by taunting those who have a different view of the world? When did they start demanding that everybody believe just exactly what they believe? Why are they so thin-skinned that a greeting as milquetoast as “Happy Holidays” becomes cause for loud grievance? Talk about your snowflakes.
I think I might know what’s going on here. It’s the last angry gasp of a fading majority that sees its lock on everything, including politics and culture, slipping away. They remember a world where “Merry Christmas” was as automatic as the transmission on their new Chevys. It didn’t need to be thought about because it was taken for granted that everyone was just like them.
Well, you know what, I pretty much grew up in that world too. And I like Christmas. I put up a tree, send cards, go to parties, share oplatki (it’s wafers that feel and taste like thin sheets of Styrofoam) on Christmas Eve with my family. I may not believe the story to be literally true but I take in the general meaning of the season: light in the face of darkness, renewal and hope, remembering to remember people who are or were close to me. It is also an excuse to eat raw beef on rye washed down with almost frozen lemon vodka.
But the world has changed and that’s not a threat to anything I hold dear. I don’t see the point in trying to defend my traditions by foisting them on everybody else. And, in the season of love, I’m not out to offend anybody, not even Mr. Christmas.
So, on Dec. 25 and during the surrounding season, well, just have a nice day.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
