Merry Yule

Shaggy and I wish you all a Merry Yule and a Happy Secular New Year. :)

I hope everyone gets awesome gifts and gets to eat some yummy food.

Ye Annual Holiday Rant

*Before I go on to my annual holiday rant I would like to formally announce that Miss Lina passed on a short while ago, after losing her fight to bowel cancer. I have been lax in writing her memorial as I have been struggling very much her somewhat sudden departure from this world. It is very much part of the reason I have been MIA as of late. I will be doing a formal memorial for her here and on The GPC forums. I just haven't had the heart to write about it. I miss my Little Miss Lina so damn much.*

Waking me from my current blogging slumber has been this awesome article that sums up everything that bugs me about the holiday season. I think the dude's got it down in this paragraph:

"But don’t kill yourself because a retail store doesn’t greet you in the way you want. At this point, you’re lucky to be greeted at all. The anger and discontent in this country has spilt over into a season that is supposed to promote good will toward man (but sadly not between a man and man). Instead it’s become just another culture clash of values. Instead of bringing people together in our shared loved of materialistic emotional investment, the season becomes an arms race of toys, vitriolic fighting over video game systems, subpoenas as stocking stuffers and idiots calling for religious dogmatism as a universal solution for a personal holiday."

I mean sure every year you see me twitch a bit when I walk in to Walmart and all they are playing is clearly Christian holiday music (what every happened to good old Frosty the Snowman and Grandma got Run Over by a Reindeer?)and yeah Shaggy yawns through my yearly commentary on Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas in public sector and retail, but I don't take it nearly to the point that some do. There is a difference between mild complaining (and commentary) and going in for the kill. There are much better reasons to boycott retailers.

Then again I was sick of all this over commercialized plastic Jesus in a manger under the clearly stolen Pagan decorations since October. It is really really annoying to be bothered with all this cheesy Christmas stuff (since none of the nice decorations come out until it's actually appropriate to be selling it.) while shopping for Samhain decorations. And what is it about Christmas that attracts all kinds of cheesy cheap decor? No other holiday sees this much plastic and plain poor design.

Can we as a society just take one collective step back from all this commercialism, consumerism and the plain old "me, me, me" attitude that surrounds this season, stop trying to steal the season from each other and get back to our respective holidays? We might just have less roits and more good clean fun.

Now excuse me while I go track down a nice traditional straw goat for my home.

I must thank The Wild Hunt Blog: A modern Pagan perspective for finding and writing about this article. :) It's an awesome blog that I check in on several times a day. That guy always finds the most interesting news articles.