holiday couture

I had conceived of writing about the different holiday things that did ultimately come up after I jumpstarted the holidays with my Scrooge-y rant. I thought I'd go on about my resistance to push, shove, and elbow others in the crowded streets or at the mall and how I don't feel the need to scurry around like that. Isn't it just a means to solidify relationships into the next year?

Well, I thought I wanted to write about that, but I keep hitting a wall. I feel like I don't really care. I don't really want this forum for personal expression anymore. I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes it's nicer to be anonymous. It's like hearing the neighbors through the wall. Make of it what you will, but it's not the truth.

Speaking of anonymity, I write short on-line film reviews. After I was involved with screening movies for a local film festival I posted a couple reviews about some of those flicks on IMDb. Out of nowhere I received a personal message from one of the actors who was in one of the really dreadful ones. He was offended, pissed off, and whatever about my opinion of the movie he was in. It really caught me off guard. I was so taken aback I almost felt uncovered from behind my IMDb moniker. I wrote him back to smooth over whatever injury he had to his pride. Strangely, he wrote back and felt comfortable enough to share how right I was about the low quality of his movie and how unprofessional the producers and crew were, and on and on. I don't know what it was but with a small bit of diplomacy on my part I gave the guy an opportunity to vent a little.

What does that have to do with the holidays? I don't really know.

It's hard to be sure of anything, growing up in one of those Easter-Christmas presumably Christian homes, where the occasional redemptive rush to church in the early morning seemed to excise my mother's demons in the off-season. It's hard to know what to take from the holiday when what you've quietly known since you were a child and began to speak up about as a teenager is that your beliefs don't coincide with what you were being fed. It's hard when the traditions are fun, taste good, and the like. It's hard to give it up just because you are repulsed by the commercialism from a standpoint that mass-marketing, pop star sell-outs, and big conglomerate buyouts make-up the news of the day and it just doesn't go away. It gets worse. Nothing becomes more about family or more about friends or simpler around the holidays. The wolves pound harder on the door and the sales get brasher.

Phew! It seems appropriate that the New Year will be met in a new apartment with a few less things after another personal purge.

I need a change.