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RADIOACTIVE: THE HOLIDAY WHIRL - RAHEEM is troubled by his own perception of the Christmas holiday and challenged by an article and a haunting memory proposing an alternative.
Oakland, CA, USA - I guess it was six years ago now that I wrote about a bad chittlings experience brought on by the fine cuisine provided by my relatives from Louisiana at a Thanksgiving gathering. I am the one writer here who has never shied away from talking about the Holiday Season and family get-togethers. I figure it's too late to change now. So we are lurching toward Christmas again right now and I'm scared this year because two people, a writer whose name I don't remember and our Publisher, over ten years ago, make we wonder what I think about Christmas.
I have a very tight-knit family and, like many Black families here in America, you can find multiple generations of us living within miles - if not blocks - of each other. It depends on the state you look at though. Some of us is down around Houma, Louisiana, and some of us is up here in northern California and then the rest is spread out in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Maryland area. After that, the people that are left are living pretty solitary in places like St. Louis, Harlem, and Compton. Yeah, that Compton. None of us see much of those latter solitaries. I can't remember the last time they even responded to an invitation to a family reunion. It's probably just as well.
I don't really think much about the relatives in that last group, to tell you the truth, until this time of year. Around now, one of them crosses my mind and I wonder if they are healthy or illin', alive or dead. Then they drop out of my mind again until another year passes. My fingers aren't broken; I suppose I could pick up a phone but I don't.
My wife Tanya's family are all here in the Bay Area, for the most part, so there's no worries there.
If you live in a major urban area, like we do, when you read this there will be only nine "shopping days" left until Christmas. In most of urban and suburban America, the stores stay open even on Sundays in order to squeeze every dollar they can out of you before the season ends. They figure one of the thousands of commercials telling us to buy-buy-buy! Is bound to kick in and force us up off the couch out to the nearest Best Buy (Man! Don't they have a big television-advertising budget?) or Wal-Mart to get that special gift for Cousin Lucille. A national jewelry retailer reminds us "... every kiss begins with Kaye." Sure.
As if TV wasn't bad enough, if you ever bought anything online, your e-mail box is probably also filled with great stuff you can buy for folks right now, too.
This is NOT a rant about how commercial the Christmas season is, it's just a statement of the facts of the circumstances of just about everybody's modern daily lives right now.
Our Esteemed Publisher doesn't do Holiday. He's usually so damned broke that no one has expected him to buy presents, let alone cards, in years. (Sometimes, I think it's by design, when he bah-humbugs this season year-after-year.) He never was much for doing family, either. So it fits.
I suppose my function here is to give him the vicarious experience of how the rest of us go about our life on the street listening to the Christmas music wafting from mall speakers and enjoying the colors and lights that festoon the roadways and the shop windows. (I certainly can't imagine PubMan shopping, either. I figure when he walks into a store, his eyes glaze over and he starts to hyperventilate. I can't even picture him in a mall or a Wal-Mart!)
Me, on the other hand, I'm a shopping fool. I don't work this hard all year not to be able to enjoy it. I got a big, big family. So right after the Detroit Lions football game, on Thanksgiving Day - Tell me something? Why, oh why, did the Detroit Lions decide sometime Back in the Day that they would hold themselves up to national humiliation on one of the biggest holidays of the year? Anyways, right after that game, after I've loosened my belt to make room for the gorge, I start working on my shopping list for Christmas.
I DON'T' shop on the day after Thanksgiving, though. Mama didn't raise no fools.
As to the decorations, Tanya's family is Old School. We go tree shopping on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The tree goes up on Sunday night and stays up until New Year's Eve. She's the kind of person who likes to do stuff like string popcorn and cranberries and has all these handmade ornaments that have been in her family for years to mix among the store-bought ones we either collected ourselves or got as gifts from friends and family who come over for the tree-trimming ritual every year. I have banned my brother-in-law Eugene from the ritual forever because he hits my eggnog too hard and then starts talking about how his sister should have married somebody who is smart.
I imagine that most of the people who are still reading this article find all of the foregoing commentary familiar. I read somewhere, don't remember where, that here in America we have not lived unmediated lives for two generations. We are totally shaped by the shared popular culture foisted on us by television (mostly,) radio, movies and fluffy magazines. Even our novels, that writer argued, are so full of brand placements that we don't notice it anymore. We are the apotheosis of Consumer Culture, the writer argued, and we're quickly becoming incapable of any uniquely individual thoughts.
I found the article scary because I was just about convinced that the guy was right. I know I can't say anything anymore that would separate my own experience from that of a hundred thousand working-class guys exactly like me: house, wife and child, family rituals, even what we eat and talk about.
Part of this guy's argument was that you can't take us out of America now because we would be cast adrift, unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance that the experience of life in the rest of the world would present us. If there were no cable TV, no Tivo and Sunday afternoon football, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves anymore. He argued, like those folks in that "Freedom Fries movie reviewed here at G21, that our very identities were now shaped by the brands of clothes we wear, tag lines from Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, celebrity gossip and fake scandals, commercial jingles and the icons of the omnipresent advertising bombardment. These, he said, were supposed to fill the hole in our souls. Oh-oh!
What scared me about that article was that, coming onto this supposedly holy season, I wanted to come up with a good counter-argument and damn me if I couldn't. I could find no evidence, in my own personal experience, that the guy was wrong.
(Considering how cocksure I am of my own arguments when I take on the likes of a Shelby Steele, this guy's thesis was humbling.)
Worse yet, I had to admit to myself that the guy's argument was part of the subtext of what our globetrotting Publisher, in his frequent Jeremiads, has been saying for too many years. He sees a disconnect from reality - as most other people outside of America experience life - and what we define as "normal."
When I stepped back from that article, wrestled with it in my mind, I got uncomfortable. I remembered something that PubMan told me once when we worked together in that warehouse here in Oakland over ten years ago. He said, "I used to tell my employees, if they really wanted to get into the spirit of Christmas, they should give a present to someone who would not know it from them."
At the time, I thought Yeah. Okay. I guess I can see that. It wasn't something I planned to do myself but I at least considered part of how that might change the dynamic. Then I forgot about it.
The article, like I say, made me come back to that idea. What exactly happens, I wondered a couple of weeks back, when you do something really nice for someone, put a lot of thought and effort into it and then don't seek any kind of acknowledgement from that effort?
Again, oh-oh! W hat the bastard was talking about was anti-American! What good is the kiss from Kaye if you know you ain't going to get it? Isn't the whole point to get your props?
So that brings me, and this article, Homeboys and -girls, back to what we think about the Holiday Whirl we are swallowed by that culminates with Christmas. I love the warm feelings I get watching those movies they trot out around this time of year that celebrate the good times with family and friends, little acts of kindness - but when I'm pressed, I guess I don't want and look for selfless acts of kindness. I just don't. Word.
I want to think that doesn't mean that I'm missing the "true meaning of Christmas," but right now, I guess I have to wonder.
Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Us All.
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