When I was a child I spoke as a child, and parroted the childish complaints of some adults–the most seasonal of which was that the Holidays have stretched too long, have intruded too far, that Christmas encroaches upon Thanksgiving, and now threatens even Halloween, all while Halloween spreads out into September and even Labor Day.  Where is the restraint! the boundaries! where will the madness end! seems to be the evergreen hue and a cry.  Reasons for seasons are lost, stresses elevated, budgets strained, etc. and etc.

But now that I’m a little older, a little more tolerant, a little more wounded, I…maybe don’t excuse the increasingly-bloated holidays…but understand the impulse, a little more charitably.

Time flies fast as you know; and the older you get, the faster it moves, and the swifter you approach the day when time won’t move at all.  A physicist friend of mine once calculated that, logarithmically (because when you’re 3 a year is a third of your life, at 4 it’s a fourth, at 5 it’s a fifth, and etc.), by the time one turns 30, even if you still live to be 90, you have already experienced roughly 90% of your life. Hence, Holiday seasons that seemed to last a lifetime as a child, are suddenly over almost before they begin.  Even now, I’m aware that the season will be over in less than a month, and I haven’t even started to do anything to enjoy this month that was once so saturated in childhood wonder. No, I now have papers to grade, lessons to plan, bills to pay, and a myriad other real responsibilities that ration off my attention away from the holidays that once meant so much to me.

So what can we do?  Maybe we’re a little weak, maybe more sentimental than we’d care to be, but we let the season expand a bit, last a little longer, not protest as loudly when the store-front decorations go up a little earlier, perhaps proportionally let the season fill the same amount of our lives that it felt like it filled when we were kids, all in our inevitably-losing battle against the end of time, lest we turn our heads and find we’ve barely acknowledged yet another of our limited allotment of Christmases…