“These are Santa’s bucks. His reindeer are all does.” — collage AleXander Hirka

The Reason For The Season

Something for Everyone On Your list

Part One —Five Holiday Impressions

• The Most Wonderful Time of The Year showers down from the speakers overhead onto the labyrinth of shoppers below—scurrying this way and that, filling their carts with ten pound bags, some labeled Fat and others Sugar, in a Busby Berkeley swirl of Product and Consumer and Carol. The number winds down to the rum-pum-pum-pum of Little Drummer Boy—the movie screen lighting up with the faces of Bing Crosby and David Bowie, singing together, uniting the generations, as a young couple strolls by smiling, pushing a shopping cart and a baby stroller. A full immersion baptism.

• Churches are wiping down the kneelers and preparing for that singular day in the year when every pew is full of bundled up believers. The holiday cassock is out of the mothballs. The sermon is being rehearsed. During this time of PFS (Prescribed Financial Squandering) it is always good to remind parishioners of the POTH (Plight Of The Homeless). The basket is ready to make the rounds—there will even be some fives!—donations, sacrifices—letting some air out of that tired guilt. The voices will be raised in communal joy, lifted in praise as the weight of that gnawing holiday sense of duty and responsibility is being sent into exile for another year. Well, ten months.