I tend towards the scroogier end of things in terms of the Christmas season. When Christmas shopping ads interrupt my Thanksgiving football, I glower. By the time Dec. 24 comes around, I feel like strangling Rudolph, tackling Frosty and not leaving a bite to eat for old Saint Nick. I swear, every year it starts well. I’m ready for the nip in the air, watching the Christmas lights go up, egg nog, the whole bit. But I can’t maintain.
I treat the Christmas religious celebration with a general ennui earned through many, many holiday seasons of being swamped with Christmas, American celebration of consumer culture. The former is a struggling second to the latter when I think about the end of the year.
So it was much to my surprise that I was belting out Christmas carols in the back of a bus bound for Cairo this weekend, tra-la-la-ing without a care. Maybe it’s American holiday withdrawal from having spent my Thanksgiving weekend, literally, in the middle of the desert. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. Maybe I was really, really bored.
What gives?
I was honestly swept by a little nostalgia for the event, nay, the Christmas spirit, so dear to the land of the free. And I think it's because I’m coming up the end of the novelty of being a stranger in a strange land. After spending the weekend listening to Bedouin campfire ballads I couldn’t understand, here was something from my childhood, in English, that I could do with all my American pals and feel at home. After gliding through Thanksgiving without a “Roman rooster,” (the literal Arabic translation for turkey) in sight, I think I wanted to get back a little of what would usually drive me nuts.
When a bunch of WASPs and a second-generation Indian immigrant can be led by a Jewish girl in songs about jingle bells and Jesus more than a month before the actual Big Day, well, finally I found a Christmas season I could really get into.
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