Coming Once Again

My wife wants to know about classic Christmas movies, for a program she is teaching.  What do you say?  “A Christmas Carol”, “Miracle on Thirty-fourth St.”, “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas?”  It all feels narrow and predisposed.  She has a random Youtube channel on that is playing tinny versions of all the obligatory carols and I ask her to turn it off. 

At dinner I notice that my younger one does not, automatically, robotically, know every single word to Rudolph’s saga.  She starts to sing it again, making up words.  I am pulled into spelling out exactly what is said.  We move on to Frosty.  I note that once again she doesn’t know much beyond the opening line.  I note that I do.  I note that this is not a merry transfer of cultural knowledge, but rather that the carols are grating.  I try to explain that we had no choice but to absorb all these every year, once a month, of my life.  Inside, the automatic dialogue of “bah humbug” vs. “its for the kids” commences in my mind. 

Our tree has been up, naked, for the past few days.  The ornaments box is somewhere in the garage.  I could have searched for it during the day.  I’m not going to do it now in the dark.  To move anything I’d need to move it all outside, and it’s cold and foul out there.

It’s coming once again.  It’s bigger than you, or your civilization.  It is about the kids, until such time that it becomes about their kids.   And it has its own down and up cycle every time, until the release and the clean up.

My wife had already found the ornament box.