Happy Christmas and Merry New Year!

I could devote this entire email (now blog) to breaking down the concept of Christmas as well as that of the new year, our idea of time being a straight line and a circle, but mostly a beginning and end (and when writing a paper for my mythology class I struggled with the idea of the birth of language, how it started, and if it started, what there was before it, or when it started (all of which could be deemed ambiguous)), of religion being not a collection of old ideas, of the sublimation of things past and present into a bigger smorgasbord of thought, but rather a new creation of the world, of how these holidays can't exist without people, and how that is what makes them, not the holidays themselves, but the function they pose and the workers that we are in creating, maintaining (by celebration), and the continuation of tradition regardless of the facts of logic, or history, but that of folklore and fun.

But if I did that, what would we do for Christmas or New Years?!

I myself, if you haven't already noticed, am not a man blanketed by religion. Rather I see it as a tool with the scope of understanding and interpreting the theory of a being higher than us. A being that therefore does not live in our society, and if it were not a being it would be an inferior animal; animals that are better when they are domesticated and used as slaves, just as people, in order to survive. But don't blame me for those words, blame Aristotle.

I recently picked up his La Politica and have read only the first three chapters on the birth of the city, that of the society, and of property. It's really interesting and even though his language (I'm reading it in Italian) is simple and easy to read it is very difficult to comprehend. I also have to stop myself from trying to compare his thoughts with mine, since they are so far apart (and at the same time at the exact same instant!). But I have to remember that in his time slavery was normal, there wasn't the idea of a grand country, and most people were illiterate. At least that's what history tells us, or rather that's what we tell history to tell us. But, I digress.

I think the value that I always got out of Christmas was never the religious part. It was the memories of going and getting the tree, of spending a ridiculous amount of money for your house to smell of pine for a few weeks, and then throwing underneath material things that might be used for a few weeks after the fact, or better yet, would get re-gifted. It was when we would go to my grandmother's house and exchange gift cards to various places that our parents told our aunts and uncles to buy us. And if only all stores had a cash-back policy.

But all kidding aside, it was more the feeling of no school, of waking up early and finding that someone knew we were there, that someone cared enough about us to buy us things that we wanted, things that we told ourselves we would always need, and things that we might be the same without. As you can see I'm not really sure why it is special to me, but it is. And maybe the things most important in our lives (that we deem important respectively based on our own values) are better left unexplained: truth, love, christmas. I think it's ok to stop capitalizing it now, I don't think anyone will get mad (let's hope).

A few years ago I made a new years resolution to stop making new years resolutions, because change for the better shouldn't be something put off until the "1st" of the "year" but rather lived out and began (or ended) when the "time" is "right." That's a lot of propaganda, but all kidding aside (again) I think it's important to do things that we think are right when we think they are right, and not a designated time to say "this year I'm going to quit drinking, and next year I will do the same thing." Does it make us feel good? It did for me, until I realized that it's just fun to have fun, and not have a crazy tradition needed to have fun. The world will be drunk on December 31, 2008, but wasn't the world drunk the night before and won't it be drunk again the day after? The trouble that I have is artificially raising the day and making it more important than today, because now today is the most important day of our lives, more important than yesterday and tomorrow, but tomorrow it will all change again.

About a month ago my Iranian roomate asked me the best thing that I ever did in my entire life. I thought for a second, and without trying to make it sound too sarcastic I responded to him, "I woke up this morning." He didn't laugh, and then he did. And he smiled, and I smiled. He liked it, and the scary thing is that I honestly think that that is the best thing we can ever do in our lives: continue living. Sometimes it's difficult, especially in the winter, at the moment when we wake up all warm and still woozy from our sleep, a somewhat light headed drunken state where the only thing that matters are dark lights and warm blankets. To leave that safe space we have to take a risk, to leave our comfort zone, knowing that things are going to get cold, to get difficult, and that we are going to have to put together some effort to be warm again, to find another way to keep warm, to enjoy ourselves more than we did under those covers. And that's why I like the notion of night and day being death and life, a continuous process that happens whether or not we take notice, but that would mean that nature (us) wouldn't worry about us. Do we have to worry about ourselves? How does one survive? Both questions are extremely loaded with a million different beautiful and correct responses spread throughout the world.

I'm trying to see all of them, but I have a feeling I don't need to look further than my own bed. I guess the world can be as big or small as you want it to be, and that's something to be excited about.

Happy Christmas and Merry New Years! (thanks Jenn)

-Anthony