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captainsblogThe Garish Christmas Car was back at Wegmans last night, this time with Garish Santa Suit Guy parading around in the parking lot next to it, his halls as decked as his car was when I shot this two weeks ago:
So please, Bill-O. Don't tell me your oppressed majority is suffering any restrictions on your right of Christmassy expression. Except, perhaps, for the ones you are putting on yourselves. If this fake "war" ever gets its documentary, I am confident that December 25, 2012 will go down as the Day the Christmas Card Died.
I've made my list. Earlier in the day when I took that picture, I picked up handmade cards (one set with Christmas mentioned, one without) for the list we've stayed connected to for most if not all of our married years. Later today, before leaving, I will sit down and make a dent in them. Usually, by now I've been shamed by the early efforts of those people, and others, who get theirs out earlier in the month. As of this writing, though? We've received a grand total of two.
Work, relatively speaking, is no better. Both offices are usually crawling in them by now, but Rochester has only a handful, and my regular office here has perhaps a half dozen on the office manager's door. We're still sending them, and I was getting the catalogs to personalize them for clients as far back as June, but this is the year that something finally changed.
It's not the internet per se. E-cards in various forms have been around since early AOL days. Yet it always seemed a tacky substitute, until social media became so pervasive. As Books and Tweets and Plusses have become integrated and always-on in our lives, we've now been conditioned to "Say Happy Birthday!" to everyone by just clicking a candle. It reminds us, and then it forgives us.
It hits here, too. I used to put a lot of effort into birthday posts to Friends- often elaborate poems and filks or other creative efforts. Now I tend to reserve those for the un-Booked, because, hey!, I already said happy birthday to them! Even then, I try to put a little creativity into each one- some riff on an old memory or running joke- but when I got over 100 clicks on my candle last month? Close to 90 percent of them were "happy birthday" and little variant other than capital letters and punctuation.
So maybe there is a war, but it's not on Christmas. It's on closeness. We're unintended civilian casualties, and we're being taken out by drones.
So please, Bill-O. Don't tell me your oppressed majority is suffering any restrictions on your right of Christmassy expression. Except, perhaps, for the ones you are putting on yourselves. If this fake "war" ever gets its documentary, I am confident that December 25, 2012 will go down as the Day the Christmas Card Died.
I've made my list. Earlier in the day when I took that picture, I picked up handmade cards (one set with Christmas mentioned, one without) for the list we've stayed connected to for most if not all of our married years. Later today, before leaving, I will sit down and make a dent in them. Usually, by now I've been shamed by the early efforts of those people, and others, who get theirs out earlier in the month. As of this writing, though? We've received a grand total of two.
Work, relatively speaking, is no better. Both offices are usually crawling in them by now, but Rochester has only a handful, and my regular office here has perhaps a half dozen on the office manager's door. We're still sending them, and I was getting the catalogs to personalize them for clients as far back as June, but this is the year that something finally changed.
It's not the internet per se. E-cards in various forms have been around since early AOL days. Yet it always seemed a tacky substitute, until social media became so pervasive. As Books and Tweets and Plusses have become integrated and always-on in our lives, we've now been conditioned to "Say Happy Birthday!" to everyone by just clicking a candle. It reminds us, and then it forgives us.
It hits here, too. I used to put a lot of effort into birthday posts to Friends- often elaborate poems and filks or other creative efforts. Now I tend to reserve those for the un-Booked, because, hey!, I already said happy birthday to them! Even then, I try to put a little creativity into each one- some riff on an old memory or running joke- but when I got over 100 clicks on my candle last month? Close to 90 percent of them were "happy birthday" and little variant other than capital letters and punctuation.
So maybe there is a war, but it's not on Christmas. It's on closeness. We're unintended civilian casualties, and we're being taken out by drones.
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Date: 2012-12-18 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-18 03:15 pm (UTC)http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121218/LIFE/121219254/1003
And Eleanor's seen him in the store in some of his other getups.
Why am I not surprised he's from Batavia?;)