The Battle of the Seasons: Christmas vs. Holiday

when early november rolled around this year, it brought along with it the first tastes of winter. you know what i'm talking about...

you get out of your car at the end of the day and are reminded that the cold, dry air outside has a sharp edge to it. you pull the two sides of your jacket together and shrink your head into your shoulders in an innate reaction to keep warm. you then smell the smoke from wood burning in a neighbor's fireplace and catch the sun magnifying the golds and the reds of the poplars and the maples as it falls behind the treeline much earlier than you are used to. walking around the corner of the house, from the driveway to the sidewalk, you halfway expect to see a douglas fir illuminated with tiny lights and a james bond movie on Spike through the front window. for a short time, maybe even a split second, smells like, looks like, feels like... must be... Christmas

but its not. its not even thanksgiving. its barely past halloween. why then do i feel like i should turn that corner and see the Christmas lights on the Christmas tree and Christmas in The World is Not Enough? because i skip over it on the radio. i wade through it in the stores. i see it in countless commercials on TV. as far as society is concerned, november 1st is the beginning of the Christmas season. i will take this forum to firmly object and say "nah son."

the title of this post alludes to a discrepancy between the Christmas season and the Holiday season.

wait... aren't they the same? well i guess on some level i always knew they weren't really the same. i just thought that non-Christians (and all schools, places of business, governments and public places who wish to be politically correct) preferred the term holiday. that way they can get Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Eid-ul-Adha in there (just to name a few) without giving special treatment to Christians. wow they really aren't the same are they?

no they are not. this begs the question, how are they different? well that's a matter of opinion. while some people would like nothing more than to equate the two (focusing only on Christmas from mid october to the day their tree dies), i would much rather draw the line at black friday. black friday (among others) is the day after thanksgiving and has earned such a name because it a) is generally the day that retail stores see their numbers move into the black (from the red) and b) is always a friday seeing as thanksgiving is always a thursday.

why draw the line at black friday? why not get into the spirit earlier than that? what's the harm in getting excited about Christmas?

no harm in that at all. its a personal thing. i, personally, choose not to listen to Christmas music until thanksgiving is over. i, personally, would not want my abode (be it with my parents, my own apartment or my future house with my future wife and kids) to be decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving is over* and certainly not before Halloween**.

don't get me wrong... i thoroughly enjoy Christmas music and i also enjoy a nicely lit tree and the occasional jar of Holiday themed Hershey's Kisses (even though they are colored silver, red, green and sometimes gold which are primarily the colors of Christmas... but see Hershey's is a big corporation and they should play it safe so that people wont get offended that they are Christmas candies. Jews and Muslims like chocolate too...).

i just feel like each holiday that you choose to participate in needs to have its own time frame for build up, execution, and wind down. more specifically, in today's "Holiday Season" there are four sub-seasons: halloween, thanksgiving, Christmas and new years (five if you count NCAA Bowl season). i am all for calling this roughly three-month period of time the "Holiday Season." no problem. but i, personally, impose boundaries on those four (not necessarily five) holidays so that i do not celebrate one before another is over.

keeping these boundaries helps to focus on the holiday at hand. thanksgiving is about being with family, being thankful and giving thanks for the things that you have and have been given in this world. Christmas is about recognizing and remembering the birth of Jesus Christ. notice that nothing (except for Christmas music, not Holiday music) that we see in the media has anything to do with those things. its all about saving money at 4am on friday (Kohl's will be open at 4am in case you wanted to know), eating turkey in front of the TV watching the Lions play, and buying and obsessing over material things whilst sippin' on a little Jack and nog.

i'm not trying to preach to y'all. all i'm saying is that i would like to challenge you to get the most out of the holidays (plural) this season. and i don't mean just going through the motions of thanksgiving or asking for more than you usually would for Christmas. i challenge you to think about what these holidays mean outside of the media. if you do that, i think you'll pick up what i'm putting down.


i am going to start to put a new item at the bottom of every post. it will be my "Jam of the Day." it will not necessarily be a song, although it could be. it will be something during the day or week that i have found to be exceedingly excellent. this thing could also be labeled "Junk of the Day," "Blig of the Day" or even "Dip of the Day." really, it could be anything of the day. just know its a good thing.

Jam of the Day

Rihanna ft. Ne-Yo - Hate That I love You

surprised? i've become a sucker for anything with a good beat and an even better melody. this song has both. don't worry, i'll have some other erich-like jams of the day in the future. just thought i'd start it off with a bang. let me know what you think.

see y'all later. take a nap after the turkey.

* i may eat those words some day. i am kind of a pushover...
** not that much of a pushover though