It's once again the middle of the night, or morning, or whatever you'd like to call it, and I'm once again awake from a combination of impatient waterworks and late-night TV. When I woke up, one of those middle-of-the-night infomercials was going on about some kind of superwhite toothpaste that costs about $40 a tube. Hell, I can remember when $40 was a respectable week's pay. And why can't my bladder or kidneys sleep as long as I'd like to? Who's running this show anyway - me or them? Obviously them.
The good news is we're better than halfway through The Silly Season, during which we celebrate traditions of Christmas that aren't really old enough to properly qualify as real honest-to-God traditions, and include mostly ingredients which have little or no actual connection to any legitimate history of Christ or Christianity, if we get right down to it. So we're basically celebrating some popular folktales or myths with which we're just perpetuating the ancient winter solstice celebrations popularized during the days of ancient Rome with their Saturnalia festival which usually was from December 17 to 23. It celebrated their main agricultural god Saturn as well as the 'birth of the sun' as the solstice once again marked the beginning of the lengthening days. Like the old song says, 'Everything old is new again'.
We're now at the part of the Silly Season where we make and break resolutions, and mentally re-bury the famous and semi-famous dead of the past year, and begin to look forward to falling over the Fiscal Cliff, or being snowed in, or taking some of the profits from Christmas business and quietly sneaking off to some tropical vacation spot, if we're lucky enough to be able to do that. And even though prognostications do not appear favorable at the moment, here's hoping we have a Happy New Year.
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