Call me a true Christian or just a good old-fashioned curmudgeon but I normally refuse to get into the Christmas spirit until it’s fairly close to Christmas. I find the whole notion that the so-called “holidays” begin with Halloween vaguely absurd, at best, or utterly obscene, at worst. 

Secular fundamentalism kills everything it kisses, and that includes the “holidays”, which are certainly not marketed as “holy days”. Halloween has ceased to be “All Hallows Eve” and has become a pagan necrofest. Thanksgiving (thank goodness) is still largely unpolluted by our deplorable epoch’s kiss of death but that’s because most of us are not really sure to whom or what we’re giving our thanks, or what it is exactly for which we should be thankful.

Now that Thanksgiving is out of the way, the cynics, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, are trying to convince us that we need to spend more than we can afford for the Holidays (the word Christmas is avoided as though it were an expletive, and the word “Christ” is practically verboten).

Today is, however, the feast of Santa Claus himself. Yes, it’s St. Nicholas’ Day. This morning our five-year-old came downstairs earlier than usual, full of excitement to see whether Saint Nicholas had left a gift in her shoes. Her eyes lit up to see an effigy of the saint himself peering at her from her shoes. Her eyes lit up even brighter when she realised that the effigy was made of chocolate. Digging deeper into the shoes, she drew out some golden coins. Imagine her delight when she discovered that they were not made of gold but were made of chocolate too! Beside the shoes was a silver package containing home-baked star cookies! On such a day, with the light of the Christ child shining in the eyes of my own child, the curmudgeon was vanquished and the Christmas spirit was unleashed. I know it’s still advent, of course, but St. Nicholas’ Day can be considered a little Christmas, a tantalizing tidbit thrown to us as we await the Big Day itself.

In order to show that I am not as much of a curmudgeon as I sometimes believe myself to be, or at least as I sometimes pretend to be, here is a Christmas list that I wrote for the Imaginative Conservative:     

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/12/christmas-gifts-imaginative-conservatives.html