[Image: “Christmas in Color and Grayscale,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (first paragraph):

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it Christmas and went to church; the Jews called it Hanukkah and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukkah!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!”

These days, people say “Season’s Greetings,” which, when you think about it, means nothing. It’s like walking up to somebody and saying “Appropriate Remark” in a loud, cheerful voice. But “Season’s Greetings” is safer, because it does not refer to any actual religion. Some day, I imagine, even “Season’s Greetings” will be considered too religious, and we’ll celebrate the Holiday Season by saying “Have a nice day.”

(Dave Barry [source])

…and:

Initiation Song from The Finders’ Lodge

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

(Ursula K. Le Guin [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.

Pine Cove, her pseudo-Tudor architecture all tarted up in holiday quaintage–twinkle lights in all the trees along Cypress Street, fake snow blown into the corner of every shop’s windows, miniature Santas and giant candles hovering illuminated beneath every streetlight–opened to the droves of tourists from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Central Valley searching for a truly meaningful moment of Christmas commerce. Pine Cove, sleepy California coastal village–a toy town, really, with more art galleries than gas stations, more wine-tasting rooms than hardware stores–lay there, as inviting as a drunken prom queen, as Christmas loomed, only five days away. Christmas was coming, and with Christmas this year, would come the Child. Both were vast and irresistible, and miraculous. Pine Cove was expecting only one of the two.

Which is not to say that the locals didn’t get into the Christmas spirit. The two weeks before and after Christmas provided a welcome wave of cash into the town’s coffers, tourist-starved since summer. Every waitress dusted off her Santa hat and clip-on reindeer antlers and checked to make sure that there were four good pens in her apron. Hotel clerks steeled themselves for the rage of last-minute overbookings, while housekeepers switched from their normal putrid baby-powder air fresheners to a more festive putrid pine and cinnamon. Down at the Pine Cove Boutique they put a “Holiday Special” sign on the hideous reindeer sweater and marked it up for the tenth consecutive year. The Elks, Moose, Masons, and VFWs, who were basically the same bunch of drunk old guys, planned furiously for their annual Christmas parade down Cypress Street, the theme of which this year would be Patriotism in the Bed of a Pickup (mainly because that had been the theme of their Fourth of July parade and everyone still had the decorations).

(Christopher Moore [source])

…and:

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.

“What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?”

“No,” Jack said, “Good King Wencelas. I’ll count three.”

One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.

Good King Wencelas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen…

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.

“Perhaps it was a ghost,” Jim said.

“Perhaps it was trolls,” Dan said, who was always reading.

“Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,” Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

(Dylan Thomas [source])

…and

#21: Few shared cultural experiences in developed countries provoke the winds of nostalgia like those bestirring the air during the month of December. And everyone’s recalled experience of the month seems at odds with everyone else’s: “It used to be so horrible!” “It used to be so wonderful!” “I always loved this!” “I always loved that!” It’s impossible to declare, really, which memories might be correct and which, false, let alone which might be only half-true and in what ways.

And when you stop to think about that, it seems hardly to matter: that you remember something at all, and are now sharing it, passing it back and forth across the table like a small bowl of treats — that alone seems to be the point.

Meanwhile, today, here in December — whatever the month or day — is here, now, right? So then: what now? What tidbit will you share in a week, next year, in five years, in ten? Which might outlive you entirely? It’s there among the 86,400 seconds of the day, glittering like a tiny diamond in a sandbox… but only if the light hits it from the right angle. Are you looking at it properly, ready to see?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)