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Friday, November 21, 1997     Page:

Time to take a holiday from `the holiday season’
   
Many years ago the great stylist E.B. White wrote an essay about Christmas
called “The Distant Music of the Hounds.” It is a wonderfully evocative,
    short piece of American literature that conveys the larger sensation of the
season without doing injury to its religious meaningWould that we as a people
could synthesize as well as White could as a writer. We seem to be getting our
holidays all mixed up and all mixed up about our holidays.
   
Two local news items in The Times Leader only two weeks apart are salient
signposts on our road to confusion. One said that Halloween has become the
second largest holiday of the year in terms of sales, following Christmas. The
second said that people are getting upset that Christmas is arriving earlier
and earlier.
   
Taking the second first: Of course Christmas is not arriving earlier and
earlier. It “arrives” on Dec. 25 and has for centuries and centuries. It is
only the commercial exploitation of it that assaults us ever earlier in the
year, and in doing so steps on the toes of the commercial exploitation of
Halloween and Thanksgiving.
   
As to the first: Who ever said that holidays should be measured in terms of
sales? And how did Halloween become such a huge holiday by any measurement?
Once it was just a quirky little accidental oddity tucked deep in the autumn
on which kids, and kids alone, could have a little mostly harmless fun and
maybe scare themselves in the process. Now it’s been taken over by the parents
and the hucksters.
   
Halloween has far less lofty credentials than Christmas, yet in beginning
to overtake Christmas it is beginning to suffer its fate. Long ago Halloween
was somehow transmogrified from a religious veneration of the sacred dead into
a secular observance of the scary dead, just as Christmas was twisted from a
religious feast worshiping the Prince of Peace into a generic fest fostering
peace among men. Now the former has become a vague celebration of the colors
orange and black, and the latter a year-end madness.
   
Thanksgiving, meanwhile, is going in the other direction. It is, the
churches remind us, a secular holiday, yet to many Americans it has become-
vaguely, again- the most sacred. Even the unreligious often feel obliged to
feel at least solemn on that day.
   
They all have been whipped into a mush called the “holiday season,” each
holiday scarcely more important than the other, and they all “arrive” earlier
and earlier. Blame it on our American expectation of having everything
yesterday and in ever greater quantities. Blame it on the media, each of which
wants to get in on a holiday observation before the others do. Blame it on the
merchants, who squeeze the last ounce of juice from the golden goose.
   
No wonder we’re grumpy; no wonder we’re upset. Contrary to the hackneyed
saying, we can’t have it all. Even if we could, who can enjoy “it all”? We can
only enjoy the parts.
   
It’s probably too much to hope, in the encroaching holiday season (or has
it encroached already?), that we could slow down a little bit, expect a little
less, enjoy a little more. And perhaps even catch the sound of the distant
music of the hounds.