Holiday For Sale

They finally took down the Christmas tree in the courtyard of my building. Stripped it section by section of its pre-decorated modular branches whose silvery load lit up like Christmas when plugged into its trunk of steel. Erected and dismantled by a company named American Christmas (according to the corporate logo on the deep packing boxes the peculiar pieces of tree are stored in,) its crew coolly denuded and felled their towering corporate conifer and carted it away in grimly uniform 4’ x 6’ cardboard coffins. And as they dollied the goods toward the exit gates, the sun came out! Is that an allegory, and if so, for what—Easter?

We also had a giant metallic menorah in our courtyard, but there is no company called American Chanukah, or Sunbelt Shmaltz, or Prairie Dreidel. It took five burly American Christmas agents three hours to put the Christmas tree to rest, but the menorah’s demise was clandestine and sudden—a pre-dawn chrome pogrom?

Gnawing questions arise. Will we have the same un-fab pre-fab tree next year or will we have a refugee from another courtyard, annex or mall? Are we victim or beneficiary of the Environmental-Religious-Industrial complex? To keep up with the Joneses, will next year’s menorah feature the 12 Days of Chanukah?

With every season getting longer with every year—baseball in November, Christmas season starting in November before Thanksgiving Day, November elections starting the previous November (What’s with November?), it’s beginning to look a lot like we could divide every year into two parts—six months of Christmas and six months of professional sports’ playoffs.

Do you detect an encroaching viral strain of commercialism in all of this? Thanks to Fox television network’s proprietary interest in Major League Baseball, games 4, 5, and 6 of the 2009 World Series were played in—here’s that chilly month again—November. And a game 7 was by no means inconceivable. An “exceptional images” company sells Christmas ball tree decorations with a $ sign—or yen, pound or euro symbol—prominently emblazoned on them.

The Great American Pastime has already been sold to the highest bidder, (an Australian who thinks people like me who take issue with people like him should go back to where they came from, which in my case happens to be the United States). His eyes are on the enterprise. Pray he overlooks the sign on Santa’s lawn: Holiday For Sale.

They finally took down the Christmas tree in the courtyard of my building. Stripped it section by section of its pre-decorated modular branches whose silvery load lit up like Christmas when plugged into its trunk of steel. Erected and dismantled by a company named American Christmas (according to the corporate logo on the deep packing boxes the peculiar pieces of tree are stored in,) its crew coolly denuded and felled their towering corporate conifer and carted it away in grimly uniform 4’ x 6’ cardboard coffins. And as they dollied the goods toward the exit gates, the sun came out! Is that an allegory, and if so, for what—Easter?