ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 5, 1997 TAG: 9701030047
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: The Back Pew
CODY LOWE
It was only two days after Christmas. Scraps of shredded wrapping paper remained in the corners of the living room and under the couch.
That slightly overstuffed feeling was comfortably dissipated, slowly evaporating with the excitement of the holiday.
Out of that that dreamy, shimmering glow the voice on the TV in the other room startled me out of a sugar-plum vision.
"Need hundreds of sure-fire gardening tips?"
What? Gardening!?
"Train your plants to need less water!"
Well, nobody can say the folks from Time-Life ever let grass grow under their feet - though they probably include a tip on how to do that in their gardening book.
Of course, it's perfect. Just after Christmas we're sated with heavy food, images of snow-crusted landscapes, and small rooms full of large families. What better time to tempt us with dreams of warm spring days in the great, roomy outdoors working to create new green life?
The selling of the holiday season continues nonstop.
It's fascinating - and sometimes a little disturbing - to realize how well some marketing people know us.
Computers analyze data from surveys, interviews and warranty registration cards, then social scientists figure out exactly what we want at any particular time.
You have to wonder how we got by without them.
I wonder who figured out the plan to have New Year's follow Christmas by a week?
It seems like the kind of thing you'd need a computer, sophisticated marketing surveys and years of research to figure out.
Guess not, though.
Interestingly - to me, anyway - the Christmas-New Year's arrangement is a reversal from Judaism's Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur progression.
In the fall, the Jewish New Year - Rosh Hashanah - marks the beginning of a 10-day period known as High Holy Days that end with the Day of Atonement - Yom Kippur.
The Jewish High Holy Days are distinctly religious - mostly lacking the kind of commercialism associated with Christmas and New Year's - and have almost nothing in common with the later holidays except the designation of one day for the celebration of a new year.
But one cannot help but notice that in the sequence of the Jewish observances, the participants begin with the New Year holiday - associated with sweet apples and honey - and end with an introspective holy day associated with forgiveness, atonement and fasting.
That progression makes a lot of religious sense to me. The observances become increasingly contemplative, intense and spiritual.
But it is not a plan that a modern marketing department would have dreamed up.
So, what most of us in the United States observe is a slam-bang, fully secular New Year's celebration that provides a more-or-less official close to a nominally religious season.
Considering what Christmas has become, that is probably appropriate.
Though churches continue to try desperately to "keep Christ in Christmas" - successfully enough on their own grounds - the broader culture seems to be working equally desperately to avoid mentioning Jesus of Nazareth.
While some who lament that change would blame Supreme Court decisions limiting the sponsorship of religious displays by government, I don't buy that.
A judicially enforced constitutional principle of separation of church and state - taking creches off courthouse lawns - didn't take Christ out of this season.
We did.
Christians - consumers and merchants - have voluntarily shifted the Christmas focus from its religious background to a commercial forefront that the founders of the faith certainly could never have imagined.
The dominant symbols of the season are Santa, reindeer, elves, trees, ribbons, packages - all of which may be rooted in the religious observance but which have long-since been co-opted for secular purposes.
And we wrap up the whole thing with a New Year's hangover in front of the bowl game on TV.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he is head of marketing in a winter wonderland.
Those who are concerned about such things can't do much about the calendar. It's a little too late to have Christmas - the date for which was decided pretty much arbitrarily anyway - moved to another time.
Unless ...
We could adopt Old Christmas for our religious celebrations and leave the secular day to its new traditions.
Even into this century, in some isolated hollers of Appalachia and on remote islands such as Ocracoke, the English tradition of Old Christmas persisted. Based on the Julian calendar that predated the Gregorian calendar England and the Colonies adopted in 1752, Christmas would fall 13 days later - on Jan. 7.
A proposal to change the observance would never catch on, of course. Christmas has become too big, too independent, too "important" for us even to consider such a thing.
But I believe I will give a try to spend at least a little time reconsidering Christmas in a couple of days. Perhaps I can rediscover a Holy Day to supplement that earlier holiday.
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