The Fire is so Delightful

There is snow on the ground, lots and lots and then some more and you look everywhere and there are just huge mounds of it all piled high, ready for diving and tunneling and impromtu snowball fights. Our backyard is amazing. Unspoiled and serene and probably a quarter of a metre deep and just so perfect that even though it is tempting to go and run and jump and play and turn back the clock it's difficult to work up the courage to take that first step into that backyard tundra; that pristine canvas that mother nature has already signed and put on display so that we may sit and stare and wonder while we drink hot mugs of tea or hot chocolate or cider or whatever it is that gets you in that winter mood from within the safety of your own home. I love it.

People with commitments to the real world, people with jobs and commutes and real lives may not love it so much but I could care less if their daily ride to work is slower if it means that for a few weeks I can huddle inside and watch the world outside blanketed with wonderful white while I pretend that school does not exist and that everything will work out fine, somehow. The snow comes this time of year as school shuts down and it blankets the roads and sidewalks and more importantly it blankets, it smothers any problems at that institution of higher learning at least for a short while but even for that I am grateful.

I am not so grateful for Christmas, this holiday with religious undertones and heartwarming capitalist overtones, and every year I seem to write the same post questioning my supposed commitment to it. My family is not Christian. We fall under that funny segment of North America that is peculiarly a-religious and this has worked out fine for us but it makes me a little queasy around Christmas time as the entire continent gears up to celebrate Jesus' birthday. But this year I don't feel like complaining. I like to think I've reached a happy compromise with Christmas. I still don't care for gift giving, I'd rather receive nothing if it meant I didn't have to give anything, but don't listen to me, that's just my scrooge talking. I've also started to find Christmas specials particularly unwatchable, though I doubt this is something singular to me. I watch these shows and these character spout lines about wanting the perfect Christmas or whatever it is you need to do to achieve Santa's approval and I just cannot mesh that with real life, you know? It leaves me confused to think that there are people out there, somewhere, you just know they're lurking somewhere, who truly still take Christmas seriously. Is this possible? To approach Christmas from anything other than, "Oh boy here comes Christmas... Again" Does anybody see their first Christmas commercial in late October and say, "Yes, finally I can spread the joy of giving again"?

I assume that these people exist because I guess they are a statistical necessity, but it's the fact that these people are so far from my comfort zone; I have no idea what makes a person like that tick. I can't get in their head. I can't understand after all these years of bad mall Santa's and endless commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy just so that everybody you know will keep loving you, after all this there are people out there who still look to Christmas as something pure or authentic or worth getting worked up over.

I don't want to rag on Christmas this year. After all that magical day always rolls around and I'm always there under the tree getting mine so it is alway naggingly hypocritical for me to open my mouth against it.

My mom always asks, and this happens around birthdays too, what would you like? and I realise I must be the worst person to shop for because I am a man of no needs. I do not covet merchandise like it was a path to self improvement. It's just stuff and keeping mental lists of stuff I want, not need, but want in that base instinctual urge that I guess we all have to accumulate, does not appeal to me. Guys what I'm saying is that if everyone in the world were more like me, besides the obvious truth that the world would be a more handsome place, Christmas would be ruined.

I like some aspects of Christmas. The skating in front of city hall all lit up with festive colours and the time off from school is not something I will ever complain about and if all Jesus did by dying was to get me a month away from studying I'm fine with that. I can't end on that note.

The snow that is currently causing havoc with the city's productivity came all on Sunday in one day long push and we did not make it outside until five or so in the evening at which point we had lost our front steps. Let me explain my house. It is on a hill up from the sidewalk, a not inconsequential hill that makes mail people work for their paycheque and trick or treaters question how badly they want that bite sized candy bar. This is good for us at Halloween because there is left over candy to spare, but it not so good for shoveling as it requires that many more steps to plow. These are things you need to consider when you buy a house on a hill. Extra Halloween candy, but extra shoveling as well. I was not included in the decision making process when this house was bought. I was two. I would have gone for the candy anyway. So our front steps had disappeared and were instead replaced with a powdery straight run bobsled course, except at the end was a rather immovable car on the street and not a gold medal and champagne so instead of tobogganing down we had to wade, trusting in a higher power that there were in fact concrete steps buried somewhere beneath all that snow and that we would not sink to our shoulders and be carried off by marauding polar bears.

Snow is the great uniter on this street. The whole neighbourhood was turned out to reclaim their property from the snow and their cars from the snow plows. It was heartwarming, I think. Was that the spirit of Christmas out there that night, as we all dug in like inmates on a dusty Nevada highway? I feel sorry for people who never see snow. They'd probably laugh if they read that. You sorry for us? But snow is wonderful and it just makes you think that sometimes, even for just a short while, that the world outside is has reached perfection and that you wouldn't mind if it kept snowing forever because you have a whole bag of marshmallows and that is real cocoa in that mug and the fire is burning, a real fire with logs and no gas involved here, and yeah, everything is going to be alright.

Merry Christmas,

Horatio