Good morning, Netizens...
Cartoon source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer and David Horsey

Good morning, Netizens...

This morning's David Horsey Cartoon clearly speaks of the spirit of the Christmas Season for some. All one has to do is peer at this spirit of Christmas is examine the gross consumerism, the vexing greed and overpowering compulsion to buy, buy, buy, and you observe one of the various and sundry Spirits of Christmas, that I also submit are as many as diverse as the meanings of Christmas itself.

In The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickins, a traditional tale of Christmas if there ever was one, the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come each deliver their homilies and thus effectively change Scrooge from a penny-pinching skinflint into a warm-hearted old coot who immediately sets his Christmas Spirit to rights by giving the Cratchit's a better Christmas than they were expecting.

Some say we have lost the true spirit of Christmas, that we have traded it off for a few pretties and trinkets to give one another, or conversely, that we have traded off the emotional need to give of ourselves to friends and loved ones for the desire to receive.

In the last few days, I have peered into the eyes and I submit into the souls of shoppers in the local shopping malls, observed them in their habitat as sociologists might say, and what I have seen is a imperfect mix of what David Horsey has portrayed and occasionally a brief glimpse of the panoply of human cynicism that Horsey describes so aptly. I have also seen some perfection, where people cared about one another and touched human lives.

As we begin the First Week of Christmas here in the Virtual Ballroom, we need to cling to the hope that the Magic of Christmas will win out over the consumerism, that people will learn the lessons of Christmas and leave our tawdry consumerism and murderous rage to shop behind in favor of the Perfection of Christmas.

The First Week of Christmas has begun.

Dave

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