The Weak In Rock

So, a friend of mine got this as an email from a coworker today:

This is NOT a Holiday Tree

[insert touching and sentimental drawing of a decorated tree here]

This is a Christmas tree.
It is not a Hanukkah bush,
It is not an Allah plant,
It is not a Holiday hedge.
It is a Christmas tree.

Say it… CHRISTmas , CHRISTmas , CHRISTmas

Yes. CHRISTmas -

Celebrating the Birth of Jesus Christ!!!

Take a stand and pass this on !!

The epic moronitude of some really boggles the mind. As my gentle readers know, I’m not a fan of Christmas. I like the lights. I love the family gatherings. I dig getting presents. But in general it seems to me like everyone misses the point. And bullshit like this just reinforces that feeling tenfold.

Let me enlighten those of you who have been swept up in Bill O’Reilly and his wingnut all-stars’ latest crusade - fighting the war against Christmas. Ahem - the tree you’ve got in your living room has nothing to do with Christmas. It has nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

The “Christmas Tree” is a tradition that predates Christianity. Northern European pagans decorated evergreen trees to symbolize life in the midst of death. It was a symbol of hope that the community would survive the winter, back when surviving a winter was a real crapshoot.

And, as a matter of fact, putting a tree up in one’s home was not common during the Christmas season until the 19th century when Charles Dickens, working on behalf of the merchants of London, helped to promote what we consider today to be a “traditional Christmas” ritual of gift giving and celebration during the Winter Solstice.

IF these so-called conservatives really wanted to promote some kind of pure and unadulterated Christianity they’d be insisting that we chuck the trees, get rid of the piles of presents and instead of going on a mad consumerist orgy for the holidays encourage us to go to Church and to engage in solemn reflection and prayer. They’re not encouraging any of these things because they’re full of so much shit it is streaming out of their ears.

I thought I’d just run through an assortment of items today, since being at work and it being Monday and all seem to have thoroughly scrambled my noodle…

Ricardo Rincon has truly and finally left the building folks. He’ll now be giving St. Louis Cardinals fans the fits in late innings instead.

Hopefully my stomach lining will recover from all those years of that little butterball waddling out onto the mound in order to throw just the wrong pitch at just the wrong time to just the wrong guy. Now Ken Macha (spit) will have to figure out a new way to obsess on lefty/right match-ups. I’m quite sure he’s up to the task.

As my ex is fond of saying, in men’s sports, it’s really all about the showers after the game folks. Don’t believe me, read up about the locker room hijinks of the Bulgarian state soccer team. Oh, and don’t miss the bit about the goat.

Anyone who has spent enough time listening to me prattle on and on over the past few years will find this story familiar. I completely agree - we’ve got it pretty easy nowadays compared to, say the mid 1860s when the shit was thoroughly and completely hitting the fan on a daily basis and just about the only thing surgeons were good at was amputating limbs. The 20 year old student in the linked article above who thinks we’ve got it toughest now probably never considered little details like, say, having to go outside in the cold to take a crap or keeping a bowl under your bed in the event you need to take a wizz in the middle of the night. Perspective people, please.

Add to the list of things my generation has ruined - Nyquil. The makers of Nyquil, bullied by the Federal Government’s current fixation on Meth addicts have eliminated psuedoephedrine from the once mega-effective over the counter cold remedy.

So, the Walt Disney Company has decided, in their infinite wisdom (this would be, by the way, from the same font of wisdom that decided last year that continuing their relationship with Pixar, who have produced the only profitable Disney branded films in years, wasn’t worth more money) that Winnie the Pooh needs refreshing, and that the best way to do this would be to dump Christopher Robin in favor of a six year old girl companion.

I’ll let that sink in a bit.

While we’re at it, let’s change Superman’s costume to a black leather get-up, more in sync with modern superhero style. And heck, why not use our modern technological know-how to hep up Frank Sinatra’s back catalog by adding groovy modern dance beats to it?

My generation is relentlessly wrecking everything. Ok, granted, we caught the short end of the stick on everything so far because there were so few of us born compared to previous and subsequent generations but do we really have to take our frustrations out on the world by taking a collective turd on everything? Hmmm?

First we edited all the “violence” out of the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Then we made them stop broadcasting Popeye entirely. Then we figured out a way to force children to wear helmets when they ride bicycles and put warning stickers on records (which has only become a shallow marketing tool for people with less creativity than a mushroom), and now we’re wrecking Winnie the Pooh.

Really people. Leave Pooh alone.

Those who know me well know that I have no great love of the Xmas season. Oh, I dearly love the decorations and lights that pop up everywhere. They’re festive and joyful and I’m all for anything that makes the world a happier place, or at least a happier looking place. I just don’t dig the consumerism and commercialism that absolutely consumes our culture at this time of year.

I wrote a couple of years back about my experience of going to a local shopping center at my lunch hour and seeing scads of crying children surrounded by angry grown-ups. I’ve seen the same thing year after year - miserable people driving themselves mad with avarice. There’s a reason why it’s considered a deadly sin folks. Think about it.

What’s bizarre is this latest campaign on the part of the so-called conservative media who claim that Christmas traditions are under attack. I’m sorry folks, but you’re really reaching here. For one thing your idea of how entrenched the current fashion of Christmas is as a tradition is bogus. Secondly if you just look around you can see quite clearly that commercialized consumptive excess is well and truly still in fashion. If anything, the Xmas hype is more all-consuming than ever.

I’d really hate to be a little Jewish kid at this time of year. Sure, you’ve got Hanukkah, but as meaningful religious celebrations go in Judaism, that one’s sort of feeble. Growing up all the Jewish kids I knew had Xmas trees in their houses, and on December 25th they raced downstairs along with all the Christian kids, to tear open dozens of packages in an orgy of consumptive hysteria. Actually, I’d just hate to be an observant Jewish kid at this time of year.

I remember a few years back my ex-wife came home with these funny glasses. When you put them on and looked at any point of light with them the filters in the lenses causes you to see little stars of David at each light point. The effect was especially cool if you looked at a house with lots of Xmas lights on it. You’d see dozens of little David stars. The missus had several sets of these glasses and I asked if I could have one. I gave that set to a coworker who had a little boy who I knew was going to Hebrew school. She told me they were his favorite thing that year. He’d wear them when they were driving around at Christmastime and see the symbol of his religion everywhere.

What’s striking to me about folks like Bill O’Reilly who are fighting to make sure that Christmas stays commercial is that they don’t seem to understand the meaning of the holiday they’re claiming as their own. I suppose they’re not alone. I’m not religious, but I’m more reverent towards this holiday than nearly every self-proclaimed Christian I know. Christmas is supposed to be the celebration of the rememberance of the birth of Jesus. It’s supposed to be a rememberance, a celebration, of the final covenant God made with his people. And yet nearly everyone I know spends this holiday in a mad rush to empty his or her wallet. It’s sad.

So I try to keep my head up, and try to keep smiling and enjoying the bright lights, the warm wintery beverages and the chance to remind myself of the friends and family I love and cherish. And when I get the chance I try to quietly remind people what this holiday is really about.

If you’ve read this space for awhile you know about my utterly irrational hate-on for Darin Erstad. Each and every time I’m subjected to a close-up of this man on my TV whilst watching a game I will put a hand up in front of the screen and say, “get that odious troll off of my television.” I find him repulsive. He looks like he’s perpetually got food in teeth (although the reality is far more disgusting: chewing tobacco), and last season I actually witnessed the man walk onto the field, as lineups were being introduced at the Oakland Coliseum, with stains on his uniform. These were not stains one acquires from fielding drills or warm-ups. No, the odious and unkempt Mr. Erstad actually had stains on the right front and shoulder of his jersey from what was obviously the careless spitting out of tobaccos juice. *bleah* And let’s not even get into his questionable grooming habits. I’ve speculated once or twice that he has a special razor designed just for him that only cuts every third hair on his face so he can get that proper Yasser Arafat look going before a game.

Erstad is all the more odious and intolerable because, well, I’ll be honest, he’s damned good. He’s nearly impossible to get out at the plate and he’s a Gold Glove-winning first baseman. I’d probably be able to tolerate him if he, say, played for the A’s (I’d still complain though - no professional should show up for work looking like he’s been chewed on by a dog). Trouble is, he plays for the Angels, who are basically just in the way in the AL West as far as any A’s fan is concerned.

Alas, I may have to find someone new to irrationally hate on now. It turns out that Darin Erstad, while odious and unkempt, is actually a pretty cool guy, if this account on Deadspin is to be trusted. I mean, really, you have to be a pretty cool cucumber to get tossed around in a porta-potty by total strangers and not jump out and instantly open a can of whoop-ass on them, not to mention joining their tailgate party when invited.

So anyone got any suggestions for a new player to irrationally hate-on?