Tag: Holidays

Best Father’s Day Gift — Ever

FatherSunday is Father’s Day — as if you didn’t know.  As holidays go, it’s one of the biggies — even though it doesn’t actually get a day — just a designated Sunday.  But that still tells us that dads are important: just not as important as Columbus who invented the Caribbean Cruise in 1492.  Which, BTW, you should never give your dad for Father’s Day — that’s kinda a husband and wife sorta thing.  Of course, I’m not saying wives can’t give husbands Father’s Day gifts — although (not to go all Freudian) ya really don’t wanna look at the psychology of that too closely.  Just take it as the given and move on.  But I digress.

Father’s Day is all about dad and his place in the family.  In the old days, dad’s job was a job.  He did all the work in bed to start the family rolling and then buggered off to real work so everybody had a roof over their head, food to eat and a second car for mom to take the kids to school and Little League.  Every once in a while, he’d come home early, scare the hell out of the kids, maybe cut the grass or play with his power tools, eat dinner, have a couple of cocktails, kiss the wife and start the whole process all over again.  It was a good life, but nobody much bothered with dad until it came time to pony up the cash.  Of course, in our contemporary society, dad’s role in the family is really quite different.  However, as of last year, the #1 day for collect telephone calls around the world was still Father’s Day.  Plus ca change!

The real problem with Father’s Day is what do you actually do with dad?  Unlike Mother’s Day, when a bunch of flowers and a badly cooked breakfast in bed will reduce any mom to tears, dads  have higher expectations.  After all, this is the only day they get, so they’re going wanna make a meal out of it.  Let me give you a hint: outflank the old guy.
“Hey, dad! Father’s Day’s coming.  It’s your special day, so … what do you want to do?”  GOTCHA!  The ball’s in his court now, and you’ve solved the problem.  You see, dads really don’t like those humourous neckties or the ACE Grip Power Bender 5000 Utility Tool.  What most dads want is time — time with their kids.  Give him that.  And if he insists on paying for the green fees, or the tickets to the ballgame, or the beer or the lunch — give him that, too: he’s your Dad.

Christmas: Naughty and Nice

nice4We all know that Ralphie from A Christmas Story was right when he said that, for most of the year, kids were scoffers, but when it comes to the endgame all children believe in Santa Claus.  So here we are with less than two weeks to go until the Big Guy’s big night, and many of us are tallying up our naughty and nice points.  If you aren’t, well, good luck with those Kingsford briquets.

The thing is most of our contemporaries wouldn’t know “nice” if it bit them on the nose, and kids haven’t been called “naughty” since Benjamin Spock said that wasn’t very nice, back in the 50s.  That’s the problem with our modern adherence to the Theory of Moral Relativity: we never know where we stand.  But now with Christmas busting out all over, things have suddenly gotten serious.  So I’ve compiled a quick and dirty guideline to help you determine just where you fit on the Naughty and Nice front.  To be sure, this isn’t the be-all/end-all list — there are people out there thinking up naughties 24/7 — but it does represent the spirit of the holiday.

Now the legals.  This list is for entertainment purposes only.  Santa’s Naughty and Nice list is the result of intensive investigations, conducted by trained professionals.  It is the private property of Mr. Claus.  The WD Fyfe Guideline does not imply any endorsement (real or implied) by Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, the elves, the reindeer or any other denizen of the North Pole.  Nor does it represent any connection to the quality of gifts you may or may not receive this year.  Use this guideline at your own risk.  In other words, if you get total junk for Christmas, it’s your own fault.  Don’t come cryin’ to me ‘cause you lied when you took the test.  (There — I’m glad that’s over with.)

Anyway, it’s very easy.  Everybody starts at zero; give yourself a candy cane for nice realevery Nice and a lump of coal for every Naughty.  If you end up with more candy canes than coal, it’s clear sailing; if it’s the other way around, you’ve got some work to do.  Have fun, be honest and good luck.

Naughty – Yacking off at an innocent salesperson over the shape, size, colour, price or availability of any item you intend to purchase.  They didn’t build the damn thing, and they’ve been on their feet for hours.  Show some respect.

Nice – Making a fuss over a baby’s first Christmas even though the kid’s too young to know whether it’s Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Nathan’s Bar Mitzvah or the 4th of July.  It makes the mom feel good.

Naughty – Parking in the No Parking Zone, Fire Lane or middle of the aisle at the mall.  Who the hell do you think you are?

Nice – Actually singing Christmas carols, not just mouthing along as if you’ve never heard the words before.  You’ve heard these songs every year since you were in diapers.  Would it kill you to crack a tune?

Naughty – Lecturing people when they say “Merry Christmas.”  You’ve got eleven other months of the year to be politically correct – knock yourself out.  (FYI, there’s double coal if you lecture anybody saying “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings.”  Remember, if they want to be politically correct, it’s their choice, also.)

Nice – Giving some thought to the gifts you give.  Any moron can go buy Gift Cards and pass them out like parking tickets, but at Christmas time, more than any other time of the year, it’s the thought that counts.

nice real1Naughty – Butting into line.  Wait your turn.  We’re all hot, tired and grumpy.

Nice – Talking to Grandma, listening to Uncle Eddie’s endless stories or hearing about Bernice’s hip surgery.  This crap is important to old people; don’t sit there as if you’ve been shot in the face with Novocaine.  Show some interest; they can see you.

Naughty – Driving your humongous armour-plated baby stroller through the mall as if you’re the 7th Cavalry on the road to Baghdad.  Slow down!  Your kid’s getting windburn.

Nice – Lightening up on the Christmas lights.  That’s my electricity you’re wasting.  There’s no need to be able to see your house from space.  If you want to be a Griswold, install solar panels or get a wind turbine.

Naughty – Dosing yourself with perfume, Axe, body spray, cologne or any other known carcinogenic.  Christmas shopping is close order, hand-to-hand combat; chemical weapons are not allowed.

Nice – Having fun.  The holidays are not about stress.  If you’re getting stressed out, you’ve either got the constitution of a parakeet or you’re doing it wrong.  Everybody knows the turkey isn’t going to cook itself, but yelling at the kids, dog or loving life partner isn’t going to cook it any faster, either.

Naughty – Wasting time carping about how Christmas is too commercialized.  You’re not from another planet, and this isn’t your first Christmas, so quit pretending all the glitz and advertising is a big surprise.  And while I’m on the subject, don’t go around acting like you’re the only one who understands the true meaning of Christmas – especially since you’re throwing your credit card into the melee, just like everybody else.

Nice – Remember that the most important gift you can ever give anybody is your time.

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Happy Holidays?

One of the annoying things about living in the modern western world is that everybody complains so much.  There isn’t a day goes by without somebody having a nasty word to say about something.  And when it comes to high holidays like Christmas and Easter, the bellyaching reaches fever pitch.  Yesterday, sitting around the after dinner chocolate and ham, some incompetent wag (who shall remain nameless) came up with the oh-so-original: “Easter is crap!  How did we get from Christ on the Cross to bunnies and chocolate eggs?”  I suffered in silence for at least two seconds before I explained that it was a conspiracy by the Medieval Christian church to decrease the chicken population.  By convincing the peasants to collect, boil and colour eggs every spring, the priests kept the food supply at subsistence levels and thus kept the ignorant peasants in perpetual servitude.  Okay, I’m a dick, but I’m not sure she didn’t believe me.

In fact, the road from the crucifixion to the Easter Bunny was a simple case of marketing.  The early Christians were not as stupid as some people seem to think.  They knew they were the new kid on the block and it was going to be difficult to convince the heathen hordes of Europe to abandon their gods for this new guy.  After all, the pagan religions of the time were all about Mother Earth and fertility — which meant plenty of sex, wine and playing the lute (the 5th century equivalent of sex, drugs and rock and roll.)  Persuading people to give that up for abstinence, prayer and penury was a tough sell.  However, the Christians realized that the pagans had some pretty healthy spring festivals already available that celebrated the end of winter.  What they did was attach Christ’s resurrection and the renewal of the spirit to the established idea of the renewal of the earth.  From there, it was mere baby steps to preaching the gospel in terms that the local peasantry could understand.  In fact, the name “Easter” probably comes from the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess Eastre.  She was the goddess of the dawn and fertility, and her symbols were the egg and the rabbit or hare.  The Christians just cashed in on her popularity and slowly squeezed her out of the picture.  Actually, by the time The Venerable Bede was writing about her in the 8th century, she was already ancient history.  Not bad for a bunch of religious fanatics without a marketing degree among them!

The early Christians’ sizing up local festivals and parachuting their man into them gives us a glimpse into why we have holidays in the first place.

Way back in the day — before weekends, paid vacations, stress leave and personal time — life, for the vast majority of people, consisted of toil.  People worked; that’s what they did.  Their lives depended on it.  In general, as soon as you could walk, you worked, and when you couldn’t walk anymore, you died.  It was a dismal existence.  Since most people grew their own food in those days, the only change to this trudge to the grave was the seasons.  The necessity of pleasing and pleading with the gods for fair weather and a good harvest gave rise to elaborate ceremonies.  These occasional attempts to invoke the gods were opportunities for celebration.  People took their noses away from the grindstone and their shoulders away from the wheel to party.  In the autumn, when the harvest was done, it was time to sample that year’s grape crop and eat everything that couldn’t be preserved.  In the spring, after planting the crop, fertility was everybody’s responsibility, so getting naked in the sunshine was what the gods intended.  These pagan rites were the perfect place for the early Christians to deposit their saints, their rituals and their religious holidays.

Non-religious holidays came much later.  Kings might grant a special feast day to celebrate a military victory or the birth of an heir, but it wasn’t until the Age of Reason that secular holidays became institutionalized.  Yet, even up until the early 20th century, there weren’t that many holidays.  Days like Labour Day and Thanksgiving are fairly recent additions.  However, since the 1950s we’ve gone nuts and now there are very few days left on the calendar which don’t have some significance.  We have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Secretary’s Day, Boss’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Groundhog Day and on and on and on.

Yet, in the land of plenty, where we can celebrate minor saints and jumped-up rodents, there is always somebody with a sour word about it.  Holidays are a modern invention, and given we have so much to celebrate, it would be nice if we could just shut up and enjoy them.