This blog is being written to disprove my boyfriend: people can have blogs even if they're not traveling in Europe. :P For seriousers though, I kinda wanted to talk about something.
In my family, in order to fight the excessive commercializing of Christmas, always celebrated somewhat differently than people usually do. We never put our tree up, decorated, made cookies, or even said the word Christmas until Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, the stores continue to make Christmas their marketing campaign earlier and earlier every year. When I was young, I was a very judgmental person because that's the way my parents were. I remember the feeling of complete disgust I would get as we drove past Christmas lights that people had up a whole three weeks before Christmas time. Then, starting on Christmas Eve, we would very righteously celebrate, and continue celebrating all twelve days of Christmas. To discourage turning Christmas into a season of greed, we kind of stopped doing Christmas presents, though we still did stockings and St. Nicolas Day.
In the movie The Rookie, one of the crazy old guys was playing "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," and one of the other old crazy guys was like, why are you playing this song, it's April! And the other guy is like, this song is too good to play for only one month out of the year. In my house, we're only allowed to play Christmas songs 12 days out of the year. Any time after that and my mom freaks out because it's not Liturgically Christmas.
But I realized, I love Christmas! Why should we only celebrate the birth of Jesus for a short period of time? Remember when people used to say, "Why can't it be Christmas every day of the year?" Christmas is about the coolest story ever, the warm feeling of love you get when you realize how much you love your family. The joy of giving someone you love the perfect gift. Why does that have to be limited to 12 days?
St. Therese the Little Flower used to get really annoyed at this one nun who would clank her rosary beads loudly against the pew during prayer time. It was really distracting, and it drove Therese nuts. Then one day, she decided that instead of being upset, she was going to pretend that the clanking was the sound of the bells in heaven, calling her to prayer. From then on, she was able to pray with joy, and she extended this philosophy to all parts of her life. If she was annoyed with anything, she just looked at it in a different way so that she could accept and embrace it as something beautiful.
This is totally what I've been trying to do with my life ever since I read that. And when the stores put up the lights and decorations way up by Halloween, and everyone around me is like, gripe, groan, I have learned to just look at how beautiful those lights are, and take delight in them. Why the hell shouldn't I? They are very, very beautiful, when you really think about it. Take delight in Christmas, and take advantage of the fact that you have reminders of Jesus' love for you up long before the actual holiday. All the longer for you to rejoice my friend, all the longer for you to rejoice.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY! I love you!!!
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