Another Search for Light in the Darkness

My entries this holiday season are turning out to be a series of essays regarding an ongoing search for light (or truth, if you prefer) in the approaching darkness of our changing leadership.

Wow!  Just that sentence alone is too dark to contemplate further.

And yet, the holidays are happening anyway.  The sales are on, shoppers are out in force or more likely this year in front of their computer screens poised to click their mouse for the best holiday deal ever, the songs are playing on the radio, and the decorations are up everywhere.  There is no stopping the holiday this year despite the signs of gloom.

I don’t know the full story of how this feeling of good cheer came to be scheduled for this time of year.   This time of year when days are darker longer, the air is colder, and the environment overall is more hostile to human survival then at any other time of the year.  No, I don’t know the full story, but I’d be willing to bet that somewhere there was a conspiracy undertaken at some point to create a season of glad tidings for a time of year when mankind would be sorely tempted to commit mass suicide rather than brave the elements of the environment.

Now the cosmos has rubbed more salt in the wound this week with the passing of Greg Lake.  Like many others in the music industry, he recorded a composition for the season, but his work (I Believe in Father Christmas) is not a warm and fuzzy call for candy canes and eggnog.  No, in fact he went the other way. Lake dared to express his disillusionment with how the whole good and jolly season has been undermined by the mantra “buy, buy, buy.”

To that end, we will post his thought provoking ode which has been an earworm for me the last few days.  I don’t mind hearing it over and over.  The melody is soft, but beguiling.  You’re fooled into thinking this will be another happy joy tune for the season, ah, but the lyrics pull you up short.  No, listeners, it’s not necessarily an uplifting tune crammed with symbols of the season.  Rather it’s an indictment of how those symbols have been co-opted by that great “c” word: commercialization.

So go ahead buy that snow shovel which Irving Berlin insists you’ll need for Christmas Day.   Stock up on those chestnuts so you can imbibe in your favorite Currier and Ives fantasy.  And, oh yes, give an ugly pine tree a good home for a few weeks before it gets dumped to the curb for its ultimate fate in the shredder and next year’s mulch. 

I know, I know.  These images are dark.  That’s dark, dark, dark.

By all means, do all this, but keep Lake’s final pronouncement in mind.  It’s a philosophical finale which will get us through the gaudiness of the season and, perhaps, the shape of political things to come; “We get what we deserve.”

Oh, there’s some light now...

(Thank you for reading. Rest in Peace, Mr. Lake.)