I Get the Holiday Spirit

Things are going well in the United States of Yacavone. The holidays are here, and I’m beginning to adjust to the cold weather.

There is an austere beauty to winter in north Georgia. Shorn of their leaves, the hardwood trees stand like silent sentinels on the hillsides and in the hollows. Their packed ranks are interrupted only by the pine trees. An undulating carpet of fallen leaves covers the forest floor. Here and there among the trees you see the low shapes of the hollies with their prickly green leaves and bright red berries. Round clumps of dark green mistletoe cling to the top branches of oak trees; they are silhouetted against the wintery skyline. The naked trunks of the trees allow you to see the crumpled and twisted terrain of the ancient southern Appalachians.

On a cold morning there is a thin sheen of glistening ice on puddles of standing water in the fields. A white dust of frost and rime coats the shorn hay pastures and stubbly corn fields. It melts as the sun rises and touches it, but patches remain in the shadowed places. The air is cold and clean, and every now and then you catch a whiff of wood smoke from someone’s chimney. The cloudless sky is a brilliant blue after a front passes through.

The cold weather is great for sleeping. Tucked under several heavy blankets on a cold night, I sleep deeply and heavily. It’s as if my body wants to hibernate. Maybe that’s attributable to my Danish ancestry. I’d like to think there is a lot of Viking in me. That means that summer is the time to rape, pillage, burn, and steal. Winter is the time lay around a roaring fire in a great hall in a drunken sleep after drinking flagons of mead, eating slabs of roast meat, and fornicating with scantily clad, buxom, blonde Valkyries wearing large brass breast plates. Okay, you caught me in one of my wild fantasies. I’m really not like that. It’s the secret life of Walter Degenerate.

Getting into a cold bed is an ordeal. The first contact between your warm skin and the cold sheets has a high shrivel factor. It’s like going swimming in a chilly swimming pool−you’ve got to take the plunge before you can have some fun.

Cold mornings pose a dilemma when you have to pee. There is a dynamic tension between your desire not to leave the toasty comfort of your bed and the insistent demands of your bladder. If you made a graph with “Need to Pee” on the X axis and “Desire to Stay Warm” on the Y axis, the need to pee eventually becomes greater than the desire to stay warm. In other words, the bladder always wins in the end. I suppose there is a great moral lesson there, but I can’t figure out what it is. Maybe the lesson is that no good pee comes to those who sleep. I think Ben Franklin may have written that in Poor Richard’s Almanac.

Showering in the cold weather can be an experience. Fortunately we had the foresight to have hot air heaters installed in our bathrooms. There is no way I’m stepping out of a hot shower into 60 degree air. Unfortunately we did not have the foresight to install heated toilet seats in the bathrooms. There are two things that are not supposed to touch my butt: other men and cold toilet seats.

Driving anywhere on a cold morning is a minor hassle because you have to get the ice off your windshield. You can scrape it off your windshield or do what I do: start the car and turn on the defroster until the ice melts. Using the defroster means you have to sit in the car until the heater develops enough heat to melt the ice on the windshield. The process is painfully slow, especially when the temperature inside your car is the same as a meat locker. I race the engine to speed things up. I’m sure that one of these days Meredith will find me slumped over the steering wheel unconscious from carbon monoxide.

Waiting for the ice to melt is about as exciting as watching a wooly caterpillar race. There’s nothing to look at because your windows are iced up, so you just sit there shivering and staring at the ice on the windshield. The other day I believe I slipped into a full blown meditative trance watching the slowly rising line of melting ice. I would have achieved enlightenment if it weren’t for the fact that my ear lobes were so stinking cold.

I’m not complaining though. The cold weather has put me in a festive mood. It was tough to get into the spirit of Christmas in Florida. It’s just not right to be wearing shorts and flip flops as you’re decorating the Christmas tree.

Meredith is feeling the holiday spirit too. She has festooned the outside of the cabin with lights. The first time I drove down the gravel road to the cabin at night and saw the bright, blinking lights through the trees, I thought I was going to have a close encounter of the third kind. It looked like the mother ship had landed.

It’s strange how cold weather, snow, holly, and mistletoe and songs about sleigh bells and a winter wonderland put you in the Christmas spirit when the original point of the holiday is to celebrate the birth of a child born in a dry and rocky place.

The local country music station has been playing a lot of Christmas songs. Many of them are religious carols. Radio ads for local businesses talk about celebrating the birth of Christ and the true meaning of Christmas. It struck me as odd at first to hear so many religious carols and ads on a radio station that plays popular music. Then I realized I have grown accustomed to a more secularized version of Christmas in Florida. It’s different here. This is the Bible Belt, and people around here take their religion seriously.

I am aware that Christmas is not a religious holiday for everyone. Undoubtedly there are Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Humanists, Druids, Pagans and members of other faiths and sects who do not celebrate Christmas and find it offensive to be bombarded with religious Christmas songs and messages on the radio. Under the prevailing doctrine of political correctness, these people can argue that because they find the songs and ads offensive, they have the right to demand that radio stations not play them. Well, I think it works both ways. Because I’m offended by the fact you want to infringe on my enjoyment of the holidays, I have the right to tell you to take your overly sensitive, namby-pamby, heathen ass somewhere else. How’s that for a display of the true spirit of Christmas?

This political correctness crap is too complicated for me so I’m going to keep on doing what I always do which is to keep on doing what I always do. If you don’t like it, that’s too bad. I suggest that people who are offended by Christmas songs and ads on the radio do what I do when I hear Al Sharpton or Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the TV: change the channel. I’m pretty sure that if you switch to NPR you can make it through the holidays without ever hearing the words Christ, Jesus, or Nativity.

Anyway, I’m not too worried about people being offended by religious carols and ads here in Fannin County. It’s a safe bet that there are not a lot of Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Humanists, Druids, or Pagans in Fannin County to be offended. If there are, they won’t admit it. According to the census, over 80 percent of the residents in the county are Southern Baptists and most of the rest belong to other Christian denominations. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure there aren’t a few Druids in these parts. I think some of the ladies who are Georgia Master Gardeners may secretly worship trees and plants.

As for me, I like hearing the religious Christmas songs and radio ads. They make me feel like I’m experiencing an old fashioned, small town Christmas. “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” and “We Three Kings” put me in the Christmas mood better than “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” I don’t mind hearing about the birth of the little baby Jesus at the same time as you’re trying to sell me three snow tires and get one free. As John Mellencamp once sang, “Ain’t that America?”

Post Script. I’ve written before about the well endowed Postmistress at the small Mineral Bluff Post Office who favors wearing tight blue jeans and low cut sweaters. Evidently she is also feeling the holiday spirit. I had to pick up a package at the Post Office yesterday, and she was wearing a bright red sweater that said “Merry and Bright” in large letters on the front. I would have added “and large too.” I wanted to ask her which one was Merry and which one was Bright. I had to bite my tongue to refrain from saying anything.