I'm holiday-neutral. Don't love 'em, don't hate 'em. We have some low-key traditions--spend Christmas and New Years with my parents, eating See's Nuts and Chews and listening to Christmas music, or, if the resident soon-to-be-nine-year-old is in the mood, German heavy metal. (When they don't understand the words, anything goes.) We decorate a tree, we eat lasagna.
This is more or less what we've been doing for the past thirty years. I think it's the low-key, offhand traditions that last the longest. Entropy theory and all that. What takes less effort to maintain will fall apart less fast. I think. I might have that backwards. But it seems to be true in our case.
I do remember, though, that the cats were always distinctly unamused by even the minimal to-do. Wrapping paper in particular just bothered the hell out of them. And tinsel--where did we get off putting it up on the tree before they were done killing it? And those kitschy multicolored lights we always laughed about. Did we have no consideration for how stressful those flashy things were for a predator's hypervigilant nervous system? (Post-traumatic stress disorder is *default* for animals, even domesticated ones.)
If I remember right, and I may not, they tended to retreat to my room on the big day. That was great, because then I could too. One of them in particular would basically spoon with me when I lay down, he'd snuggle in tight against my stomach and then stretch out.
Melanie, Helen, Fatty, Commander, Tink, Harry, Toughie...merry Christmas, wherever you all are.
Hunting birds in sunlit fields, let's say. Why not.
