It finally got cold. For now I can live with it.
The front third of winter is always great because we have holidays. After New Year’s, though, we go into the much worse stretch of winter: the part with nothing to look forward to. At least in December we have Christmas coming. Thanksgiving through New Year’s is one long, glorious period of festivity. January 1 through May 1, however, has almost nothing to distract you from the fact that you don’t, technically, have to live here. I can’t speak for you, but I don’t decorate my house for Presidents Day and, as I’ve explained before, St. Patrick’s Day is stupid.
Hear me out: Christmas would be better-placed on something like Feb. 25th.
Think about it. We would have Christmas lights and decorations and trees and parties and sweaters for two extra months! Two glorious, festive, tinsel-bedecked extra months. That’s three full months of Christmas season, with benchmark parties for the New Year and the Super Bowl, plus it stays light out later than 3:45 p.m., which is when it currently gets dark, which’ll ameliorate holiday-related depression!
I can’t even imagine that Jesus would be mad about my moving His birthday back a couple of months. Surely, in the event of a Second Coming, He’d presumably have greater concerns than where the big day fell on a calendar that didn’t exist the last time He kept an appointment book. Besides, once I explained the idea I’m pretty sure a guy from the desert, who never experienced waiting for a train on an exposed open-air platform on a 6-degree day, would cut me some slack even if said guy didn’t also have to maintain a reputation as the forgiving sort.
It’d be the end of the Real Dead Tree Era for sure. This is not a drawback; our Christmas trees pretty reliably saw Valentine’s Day when I was a kid, and they start to look a little thin by then. I love Christmas, but not enough to fetishize the past, so real Christmas trees are a tradition that needs to go. I want the fakest of fake trees. Mine is hot pink and was delivered unto me by Amazon. I don’t get the affection for something that drops sap and sharps everywhere anyway. Folks get all moony over “a real Christmas tree” yet no one romanticizes “a real icebox.”
Christmas lights, which might be my favorite piece of widespread American culture, are all too ephemeral, even those left up well into February. Think about how depressing it is the first week of January when all the fastidious twits have taken theirs down because Christmas is over. Each delightful twinkling light is a tiny symbol of pointless defiance against the laws of physics responsible for these sad grey 7-hour days, and pointless defiance is the second-best kind of defiance.
After the big day (again here, we’re thinking of Feb. 25), we’re within days of spring training — the most reliable crocus of spring — and within a month of the first nice day.
You can’t tell me this is a bad idea. Trees up and lights on in support!