Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"My family knew I was gay when I was 15, long before I got famous. But it's a very different thing coming out to your family and coming out to the universe. That's a big step. Maybe without me, there wouldn't be Adam Lambert. Without Bowie, there wouldn't be me. Without Quentin Crisp, there wouldn't have been Bowie. So everything is part of a big daisy chain." -- Boy George, 2011-02-23 [found via the Washington Blade's year-in-quotes feature]

I know, I know, except for the auto-posted quote-of-the-day entries, I haven't posted much. Other things have been consuming all my spoons. I'm hoping that recent developments mean I'll be getting some of my time/energy/life back. (Postcard version: Mom's been having health problems that have required my taking care of her in various ways, and since I have barely enough spoons to take care of myself most weeks, there hasn't been all that much me left to do much. She's getting better.)

Anyhow, I wanted to get this out while it's technically still (new-calendar^[1]) Christmas: a few days ago, in the middle of Christmas, I tweeted something that could use some scansion-tweaking, that deserved a (slightly) longer treatment than I could do on Twitter...

On the first day of Christmas, the merchants gave to me
More canned carol cacaphony
On the second day of Christmas, the merchants said to me,
'What, Christmas? It's over -- that was yesterday...'

Basically, we have a month plus of "Christmas season" buildup that treads on other holidays, gets some people burned out on the whole Christmas thang before the holiday got here, annoys a lot of people who just aren't ready for it to be "Christmas already" in November ... and as soon as actual Christmas starts for real, everyone acts like it's over. Buildup, burnout, one day of "Wheeee, dammit, I've been stressing about getting ready for this, so 'wheee!'", and then *poof* the event all that buildup was ostensibly^[2] for ends in a flash. If it's worth a month of buildup, oughtn't it last more than a day when it finally arrives?

For various reasons -- some figured out and some still not really examined or detected -- the last few years I have not really felt at all "Christmas-y" until very close to Christmas Day itself, despite the relentless message from all around me that I'm supposed to be all revved up about it. But I still like Christmas when I can be free of some of the distracting commercial "please be excited already" pressure. Funny thing ... despite a friend's daily posts of Christmas carols during Advent (a suitable time to start preparing for Christmas, unlike Hallowe'en!), and constant exposure to "Christmas music" on television and in background music in stores, and weeks of seeing Christmas decorations, I didn't get any Christmas carols stuck in my head until Christmas Eve this year -- and I've had several stuck in my head since then. So I guess my subconscious, at least, has managed to get onto a religious, rather than commercial calendar for this particular holiday.

Anyhow, I hope everyone who celebrated it had a good Christmas, and I'm sorry I didn't manage to post this in the middle of it. And I hope the folks about to celebrate old-calendar Christmas have a good twelve days of it.

And, of course, I hope I manage to get out and see people more often in 2012.

[1] Nearly everybody who celebrates Christmas does so according to the Gregorian calendar, but a few Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar ("old calendar") for Christmas, not just Easter. So basically, everybody who celebrates Christmas except some Orthodox churches (and, IIRC, the Copts) celebrates at one time, and a few "old calendar" churches celebrate it just after new-calendar ends. (As I've observed before, if you start on Gregorian Christmas Eve and keep going until Julian Twelfth-Night, Christmas can be about a month long, but it still doesn't $#%@ing start on Hallowe'en.) Note that everybody who observes it celebrates Christmas Day on 25 December; it's just that they use 25 December in two different calendars.

[2] Of course, most of the "get ready for Christmas, aren't you excited yet?" is driven not so much by actual enthusiasm for the holiday itself, but the need to get enough of that pre-Christmas shopping money to make a profit for the year.