I Still Believe In Father Christmas

In 1975, Greg Lake released a musical protest against the commercialization of Christmas called "I Believe In Father Christmas". Over the years, the song has been mistaken as an anti-religious screed (especially given some of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's songs like "The Only Way" from 1971's Tarkus album) and a full-on Christmas carol, among other things. I am personally more familiar with the version released by ELP as a unit on 1977's Works, Volume 2 album. I grew up listening to this version, a much less bombastic rendition.

I also posted about this song to my blog for depression and anxiety, Promise of Snow, dealing with some sensitive personal issues surrounding this song. But having done that, I want to talk about Christmas.

Here's what Greg Lake sings to us:

They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on Earth
But instead it just kept on rainin'
A veil of tears for the virgin birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winter's light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell, and that Christmas tree smell
And eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'til I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
I looked to the sky with excited eyes
And I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get we deserve

Now, as I have noted a few times, I am not Christian, so I interpret the lines "And they told me a fairy story / 'til I believed in the Israelite" in the sense of the "virgin birth" being, well, a fairy story. If that admission offended you, I do not apologize; you can easily navigate away from this blog. If you didn't bat an eyelash, pray continue reading.

Last year I wrote down some of my thoughts about Christmas. (None of that has changed, but if you haven't read the older post, please do.) This year we have a full-sized tree in addition to another small tree we were given, so we have five trees in the house total -- the fiber-optic in my son's mother's room, my small tree and ceramic tree in my room, the new small tree on the kitchen table and the big tree in the living room! The big one went up a little later than the others, and the small one got decorated late too, but wow, it feels almost like the old days for me. I feel something inside me resolving.

I've been asked why I like Father Christmas / Santa Claus and angels as Christmas iconography when I don't believe in either. It's simple -- they represent our better natures. They represent the spirit of goodwill, of giving and love. I may be practically an atheist these days, but this holiday still means the world to me. In that way, I do believe in them. "From a certain point of view," as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say.

Now we come to the relevance of the song. Like clockwork, on Black Friday, the anticommercialization shouting began. It makes as much noise as the ads and the crazed shoppers, especially in the blogosphere. Greg Lake was singing about it in 1975, and nothing has changed. I still agree with the spirit of the argument, but perhaps people should focus more on what Christmas means to them and less on grousing about what other people are doing? If you don't like the ads being shoved down your throat (and who does?), shut off your TV. Spend time with your loved ones. Go to church if that's something you do. Stop just complaining and filling the air with your unhappiness -- please? It's okay to be unhappy. It's better to do something about it.

While I'm at it, what is with this rampant disease called "holiday stress"? Why do such wonderful times have to make so many people so angry and upset? This never happened in my family -- my extended family, meaning all my aunts and uncles in both my biological families and my then-stepfamily. Nobody was stressed, nobody was hateful, nobody was angry. Whence all this pain, this suppressed rage? I do not understand it. We couldn't be the only family who did it "right", could we?

As I said on my other blog, I wish you a hopeful Christmas. I wish you a brave New Year. All anguish pain and sadness, leave your heart and let your road be clear. We do get the Christmas we deserve, so let's try to deserve the best. Put out of your mind all the "oh, I just can't get along with this relative" and "I hate feeling forced to buy gifts" and try to find that spirit of love and togetherness.

A Special Note

There is a man out in the desert who is recovering from one of the worst years of his life. He has voiced his own discontent with the commercialization of Christmas and has noted that the celebration of Hannukah has parallels with his own recent trial. His words ring true, and he is not one of the people I (ironically) complain about complaining. Berin, I wish you a hopeful Christmas most of all.

Finish Line

And so, on the final day of November, I have finished a novel.

Yes, once again I have completed NaNoWriMo. That makes me six for six, but this time, I actually finished the entire story. It's incomplete in that I have scenes to add and description to put in, but I wrote the end, and that means I'm farther along than I ever have been before.

My summary on the website: "When frozen bodies start turning up in the college town of Athens, Ohio and the coroner can't even begin to explain the cause of death, vampire Nathaniel Sterling finds himself digging deep into the city's history and facing down a deadly consequence of past evil."

There's a bit less of the "digging deep into the city's history" and a lot more "facing down a deadly consequence of past evil", but I can expand from here. Editing can happen whenever I want. I fully intend to publish this book.

Coming Back In Through the Window

After a few days of using Windows 7, I'm surprised with how quickly I've adapted to the new shell and the way it wants me to handle my files. I turned off Account Control (or whatever it was called) fairly quickly, because I'm not a dangerous idiot, but I allowed myself to be nudged into using Libraries to handle my Stuff. (That's a capital S, yes.) I saw instantly how the Libraries do what they do and I came to appreciate the notion, but I'm still not totally convinced they won't assist someone in snooping on my files. That and not believing in structures outside the file system (My Documents, etc.) led me to maintain an archaic pattern of behavior where my personal management of files was concerned.

I think part of the change (as an extension of my previous post about transformation) was that it was a lot easier to just dump things into the Libraries when I was transferring things from the old Linux computer. I moved 15 DVDs worth of Stuff, and that still wasn't everything on the storage drive. As I was putting the stuff on the new hard drive it was easier to recreate the directory structures in the Libraries than to try to shove them into the proper places in the C:\ file system itself. I did make a new Library for my PDFs, though, and that was when I saw how the Libraries work. Useful and classy.

I keep having to install little things I had taken for granted -- Flash, WinRAR, Skype. Amusing, and quick. I've also taken to using a wallpaper changer, something I had sworn I would never do, and I've let go of having to manually choose my wallpaper. I may go back to doing that, but for now I'm okay with the randomizer. I had it set on 30 minutes, the default, but now it's 15 minutes because I have a lot of wallpapers to go through and I like the variety.

I've been grooving on the shell. I abhor being confined to one desktop, but the interface is pretty and smooth enough to mollify me. Why can't Microsoft get it into their heads that people like having multiple virtual desktops to work with? Because the majority of their users have never experienced the freedom multiple desktops allow, probably, and therefore don't "need" them. I tried a program to give me multiple desks, but it quickly failed and got removed (along with all the extraneous crap like games and MS programs).

I can run Skype and Anarchy Online at the same time, but it's a strain. 2 GB of RAM is good, but not enough. Luckily modern RAM seems to be cheap. I want to expand that as much as I can. A big problem with the hardware is that there's no room at all for a second hard drive, which is why I couldn't just transfer files directly. A giant drive with an enclosure would make a wonderful holiday gift. That and a video card. Hint hint.

So, after over three years, I'm back to Windows full-time. I was initially tempted to nuke Win7 for WinXP, but I think I'll stay here. I feel like I've rejoined the modern era.

Transformation

2009 has been a year of change for me. Some of the changes have been binary switches -- on/off, yes/no, one thing to another. Some have been processes, some started and others continued. While everyone changes over time, this year, especially the second half, has seen much more for me than any other I can remember.

I have added sports fandoms. I am now a fan of soccer, especially the Columbus Crew of Major League Soccer. I am now a fan of Australian Rules Football, particularly the Carlton Blues of the AFL (along with the Hawthorn Hawks and Brisbane Lions as secondary favorites). I've lost some of my interest in the NBA because I haven't been able to watch games. I first doubted, then became a fan of, the new United Football League. No team in particular has my loyalty yet; I am a fan of the league in general and support all four teams, from the undefeated and powerful Florida Tuskers to the winless and hapless New York Sentinels.

In computing, I went from Ubuntu (using Gnome) to Kubuntu (using KDE) to Windows 7 just yesterday. My home address changed from Athens, Ohio to Nelsonville, Ohio, and I've been adjusting to this new, smaller town. I've taken some people who used to be friends out of that particular circle, and reconnected with others who used to be very close to me but with whom I'd lost touch over the years.

I developed a renewed interest in the BattleTech universe. I wrote a dungeon-bashing RPG involving modular robots. I joined a new Ning network for game industry people (and gamers in general) and am looking for a game-design partner. I found myself interested in DC Comics heroes because of a video game (Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe) and found myself equally disinterested in Marvel Comics characters. I got a digital music player. I've connected with artistic people here in town. I'm going to check out Google Chrome to see if I want to switch to that from Firefox. I'm writing a novel about a vampire who likes what he is and doesn't sparkle.

If we are the sum total of what we think and do, then I, while still being me, am a much different person from who I was a year ago. Ordinarily we think about these things around the turn of the year, but it's been so noticeable to me recently that I figured I'd put down a few words about it.

I Hate College Football

What I am about to say would offend a great many sports fans across the United States, were they to actually read it (the blessings of throwing words into the wind, I guess):

I hate college football.

To be more precise, but less attention-grabbing, I think college football is nothing more than jumped-up high school ball that doesn't deserve the nationwide attention it gets. The weekly broadcasts on national networks -- especially one school, Notre Dame, having its own network deal with NBC! -- maintain an artificial fanbase. The quality of the play on the field is buzzed up as if it were professional, when in fact it is closer to high school play, and in fact the rules used more closely resemble high school codes -- clock stoppage on first down, ridiculously-wide hashmarks, etc.

Like high school football, the rosters absolutely cannot maintain any kind of long-term continuity. Unlike high-school football, college ball draws high-intensity scrutiny from all across the nation (and, indeed from outside the US as well) simply because college players either go straight to the NFL or disappear, instead of entering "farm" systems. The BCS is a bad joke. Tenured coaches, in ironic comparison to the rosters, remain far too long (see Joe Paterno at Penn State).

The play itself is fine. The kids work hard. Were college football to be judged as what it is, which is one step up from high school varsity play and not "young professional" football, I wouldn't get so annoyed. Were the fanbase left as purely local instead of forced nationwide, I wouldn't get so annoyed. Were some of the rules changed to more closely represent what we're being sold, making them closer to the NFL (or the new UFL), I wouldn't get so annoyed.

Unfortunately, I have to live within the umbra of Ohio State. This means I get OSU and the rest of the NCAA shoved down my throat every autumn. The longer I live here, the worse it gets, and NCAA football fans don't want to hear the things I have to say. They're as bad as NASCAR fans, in many ways. I have come to dread autumn Saturdays. They're the hell I have to go through before getting to blissful Sunday, when the Steelers and Cardinals play real post-high school football.

Personal Update

This post has been two months in coming because my life has been in a very bad tailspin. Our housing situation has been badly uncertain since the middle of May, and we haven't satisfactorily resolved it yet.

At some point in the coming week, we will be leaving this house and moving into a motel room on a temporary basis (a couple of weeks). We have a lead on an apartment opening up in August, but we need to be out of this house before the 24th. We have a court date on that day regarding an eviction, and I think that if we could be out of here before then, we should be fine. Otherwise we're at the mercy of the judge, and I would rather not have to worry about the judge feeling sympathetic that day.

All my projects are on hold. I haven't even had the energy to blog about what it's been doing to me personally over at Promise of Snow. Once we're actually out of here I hope to feel better enough to get some things done, including making a decision about what I want to do with this blog. Leaving it "generic" is uninspiring.

My Wide World of Sports

This is an exciting time right now for me with regard to sports. Thanks to the internet, I've been able to renew my love for NHL hockey, and my team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, are closing in on a repeat appearance in the Stanley Cup finals. The names are all new, but I've picked them up quickly, and the excitement is still there. I'm looking forward to a rematch with the Detroit Red Wings.

In the past few years I've also become a fan of the NBA, despite not liking basketball for a long time. I've learned to appreciate the game, and I've become a fan of multiple teams throughout the league, such as the Cleveland Cavaliers, Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Mavericks. The Cavs are facing the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference finals. They played really sloppily last night in Game 3, but I'm hoping they'll tighten up and return to the Finals for just the second time.

The long offseason for the NFL continues, giving me a chance to savor the sixth Super Bowl victory for my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers played well last year, despite an offensive line that's full of holes, but I don't know if we can continue that way. Something has to be done to protect Ben Roethlisberger. We'll see what happens in the offseason moves, but I don't know why the problem doesn't seem urgent to the front office. With Tom Brady returning to the New England Patriots this upcoming season and surprising developments around the AFC, we're going to have to turn it up a notch.

My new sports love, however, comes from far, far away. A friend recently introduced me to Australian rules football, a crazy fun game somewhere between rugby and soccer with some twists all its own. I picked up the basics quickly, but there are nuances that I'll have to sort out over time involving possession, what happens when the ball goes out of bounds, and so on. The fans of the teams have some impressive swag -- scarfs, especially, in official team colors. It's a fast and often furious game that appeals to me the way hockey does; it's not very much like American football at all, with different ideas, so comparisons between them don't have much meaning. I haven't seen an Australian Football League (AFL) team yet that I didn't like in some way, but so far I'm most partial to the Carlton Blues.