By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s the holiday season, for sure. While Christmas items appeared even prior to Halloween, here in the Pea Patch it was a modest — if not downright Grinch-like — offering by California standards. My son-in-law’s tradition of turning the family home into a gingerbread house of lights and decorations on the weekend after Thanksgiving finally put his competitive neighbor over the edge. Fearful of heights, he’d put the kids up on the roof year after year, but now that they’re big enough to object, he was forced into hiring a handyman to decorate for him.
The stores were all decking the halls when I left, and bell-ringers, anxious to get an early start on what promised to be meager contributions, manned their pots at door entrances everywhere. Now, back in the country, I find things aren’t so garish. The decorations have yet to go up in the town square, and besides this week’s snow, the first of the year, the one nod to the season seems to be a good stock of egg nog in the dairy case. Still, fa-la-las can’t be far off. This IS the most anticipated season of the year, even when times are tough, and kids everywhere have their little advent calendars to prove it.
Advent is a Latin word, adventus, that means “coming.” For Christians everywhere, some sort of advent activity precedes the celebration of the nativity. Early on, candy makers discovered the profit in little candy-filled calendars during the Christmas spending glut, and they come in all sizes and shapes now. I saw one for dogs the other day, a small puppy treat behind each paper door. Still, I approve of advent. The rest of the world may think advent is just a month of anticipation, but not me. I’d like to see it start on January 1st and end on December 31st.
It’s a hopeful thing to anticipate the coming of something wondrous, whether mystical or mythical, real, imagined or anything in between. I’m a patsy for this kind of thing, as should anyone be who has tasted the Great Mystery for even a moment. There is always something coming, if you believe that the universe is conspiring to bless and delight, excite and inform you. And surely this last month of the eleventh year of the twenty-first century is THE advent month that may rightfully claim that name. Something is surely coming. It’s right around the corner.
It’s interesting to listen to speculation about 2012, at this point. We’re so close to the turning of the calendar year we can taste it, yet we’re so far from what we’d hoped to be by this time, that our eyes burn when we think about it. There’s been a rash of 2012-ain’t-no-big-thing articles, which are helpful in bringing down the temperature on world-end scenario fright. That’s welcome. Given the challenges we have before us in this nation, let alone the world, we could use a little calm, a little control over the continual drama that tries to tug us into the swirling drain.