Christmas Cheer

For someone born in a temperate climate spending the Christmas season in a place like Florida is always weird. Wreaths and Christmas trees go with cold weather and more often than not snowfall or at least a walk outdoors with plumes of steam coming out of one's mouth.  Christmas decorations are geared to that back drop so that down here they just look tacky.  Which is of a piece with the constant stream of fake Christmas music, all done to a disco beat, from "I'll Be Home For Christmas," to "Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem" and so on and so forth.  Makes you want to puke.  Having been through more than eighty Christmases I cannot imagine wanting possessions, and would never buy anything for anyone unless it truly struck my fancy as somehow related to the presumed recipient.  My mother in law, oddly enough, a woman whom I never ever would have accused of being imaginative, suddenly burst out into a new personality once her daughter and I were divorced, and year after year bestowed upon me Christmas gifts that were the most unusual, interesting, absolutely pleasing and perfectly fitted to my tastes.  This continued for twenty years until she died, God bless her!  Her daughter was bestirred to make a Christmas for our four children that was truly splendid, done up in lights and tinsel and all the trimmings.  The year we all spent Christmas in Rome inspired her to new heights.  Although there is no snow, Rome with its myriad churches, each out doing the other in lights and decoration, demanding that you know the The Birthday Is Imminent.The season is always magical, especially down around the Piazza Navona where the shepherds come down from the hills to play their music walking around among the splendid little huts set up for selling special Christmas treats.  She bought all kinds of colored papers, silver tassels, golden horns--her imagination ran riot, and we had the most flamboyant exciting Christmas of our lives.  Of course, as classicists know, it is not about Christmas at all but the long ago tradition of the Roman Saturnalia, which began on December 17th, and we can add to that the festival celebrating the birth of the new year which comes on the 21st of December, the shortest day of the year, heralding the return of longer days and more sunshine.  Happy Days Are Here Again.