Happy Procrastination Days to all

I love Christmas. So don’t get me wrong on what I am about to say…

This country is off its’ rocker. I guess that could be said in a broad sense, but is when it comes to Christmas and New Year’s, we really are out of control. I’m not even going to get into the fact that we generally miss the whole point of Christmas. I won’t discuss ( not in this post) my irritation with this whole “holiday tree” vs Christmas Tree debate. Let’s not talk about commercialism, or even misguided “traditions”, or competitive “holidays” that seem to have come out of nowhere…

No, I want to address the fact that from Thanksgiving until sometime around January 4 nobody wants to do anything but prepare, celebrate, and recover from “The holidays”. Like I said, I love Christmas. I enjoy decorating the house right around Thanksgiving and listening to Christmas music. I love the whole “holiday tradition thing”. What I don’t get however is the lack of ambition that the holidays bring on to the rest of the country. Suddenly Christmas has become an excuse for inactivity and non-decisiveness.

Look around you, at work no one answers their phones, everyone who can arrives late, sneaks out early, takes a little longer for lunch and generally procrastinates everything until “after the holidays”. Socially, no one can make a commitment to do anything until “after the holidays”. People who generally are willing to volunteer for tasks at churches, schools, hospitals, etc, suddenly can’t make a decision or a commitment until “after the holidays”.

What the hell are people doing that they are so shut down and unable to focus on anything else? How many cookies can you bake? How much gift buying and wrapping can you do? My God, even if you get drunk on eggnog and rum every day, there is still time between hang-over and next pour to return a few phone calls.

I will wager that Mary and Joseph didn’t do as much planning for the birth of Jesus as we do today to celebrate that birth. (Oh yeah… The birth of Jesus is the reason for the celebration, in case you forgot. ) In fact, there is biblical evidence that they waited until the last minute. Remember…they got to Bethlehem on time to answer the census, but they forgot to call ahead for hotel reservations. Consequently, the Bethlehem Ritz was sold out and they ended up sleeping and giving birth in a barn. While we like to think that Mary was ok with that, I’ll bet Joseph was in plenty of hot water over his procrastination. I would like to do some research on that whole episode, but I think I will wait until after the holidays.