The Nostalgia Machine

From the brilliant xkcd.com  His cartoons all carry an Easter egg, visible when you mouse over them; the one on this chart says: "An American tradition is anything that happened to a Baby-Boomer twice."

Regardless of what I may have said in recent posts, I really do enjoy the holiday season.  I even enjoy some of the more commercial aspects of it, especially the yearly ritual of bemoaning the commercialism of the season while simultaneously wallowing in it.  In large part, though, my enjoyment is based in nostalgia of the purest kind, and my nostalgia is triggered by cynical advertising ploys, bent on producing exactly the kind of reaction xkcd's referring to with the above chart.  Why is our Christmas celebration rooted so very firmly in the past?  If I remove the baby-boom signifiers from the season - the Red-Rider Air Rifle kind of stuff - I'm left with yet another layer of images from a vanished past, namely the Victorian era, when people actually rode around in sleighs, and Dickens was the hot new thing.

Almost completely vanished is the version of Christmas that existed before Dickens and Currier & Ives got a hold of it, and that's the one I'd like to have seen.  It's the source of such grand traditions as caroling and wassailing - essentially trick-or-treat for grown-ups, involving copious amounts of alcohol and threats of Occupy Wall Street-like action if demands for same were not met.  It was such a hell-raiser of a night, in many places Christmas was considered a little bit dangerous.  It's not hard to imagine that the relatively quiet and family-friendly version of the holiday that we celebrate now serves as an instrument of social control, to prevent the kind of shenanigans that a snow-bound and underemployed populous might otherwise get up to.  I have nothing at all to back that up, I'm just shooting from the hip.

Anyway, the past versions of Christmas; quasi-Pagan rager, Dickensian sleigh-ride, and suburban utopia, are all just that, in the past.  They've served their purpose, and we can remember them fondly, but we also need our own, new ways to get in the Christmas spirit and propagate the (truly beneficial) ideals for which the holiday stands.  To that end, I'm shamelessly plugging the new movie Arthur Christmas, which, among other things, asks of Santa Claus this timely question:

If you live at the North Pole, how come I can't see your house on Google Earth?

It answers it and other questions too, in an extraordinarily satisfying, entertaining, and yes, even moving way.  Go see it.  Seriously, take the kids.

And Happy Holidays.