I will try to get a few more pictures of the purple coat posted when I get home tonight, but right now I have to vent a little.
I feel like a big, ol', grumpy Scrooge. More so than normal.
All of the Christmas music on the radio irritates me to violent levels.
Christmas decorations put thoughts of uncivil disobedience in my mind involving Yule Log-inspired arson.
The thought of consumer driven frenzy to procure objects of shoddy workmanship that somehow are supposed to encompass my love for friends and family sends me into a panic.
And I almost gave up on seeing some friends because of a crass commercialization and public consumption of energy resources down Nicollet Mall!
(and just look at the word choices this season is putting in my head)
I've never been a "Let's go to the Mall and sing Top 40 arrangements of Christmas Carols while running up a credit card debt to rival the World Bank default of some small countries"-kind of holiday person, but this year I'm even starting to alarm myself in my Humbuggedness.
I like Christmas. Seeing friends and family. Cold weather and warm drinks. The Pagan-based celebration of the Yule. Attention paid to a lowly birth of the son of God, to a family that was turned out into the street and had to seek refuge in the ancient equivalent of squatting in a super fund garage. These are things that can't be commercialized.
But for some reason, I feel that this year, the mass consumption machine is out to get me. Not me personally, but, like those pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, taking over everything around me. I like Christmas for the "Silent Night" aspect, the quiet and serene appreciation of Awe. But for some reason, this year it is hitting me especially hard, that all I see and hear around me is a cacophonous din of gaudy light displays, battling modern arrangements of carols assaulting the senses, the omnipresent buy-buy-buy-consume-consume-consume message shouted down from On High where once there were Angels but instead are speaker systems, radio commercials, billboards and daily newspaper inserts.
Sigh.
Merry Christmas, every one.