He was describing his horror of a hypothetical "The Eagles' California Christmas Album." Morgan dislikes The Eagles, a pop-country-Western band, for what he sees as the vacuity of their music. He dislikes Christmas, the old pagan solstice traditions misappropriated, as he sees it, for a Christian celebration "without theological significance."

I got the feeling from Morgan's "album title," too, that our fellow blogger--a Manhattanite--has a particular dread of the juxtaposition of "California" and "Christmas."

You look at it one way, Morgan's dread--if I read his remark correctly--is justified. You get the arbitrary grafting of Christian celebration onto pagan solstice tradition--that's one layer of fakery. Then you get the sparkling synthetic "snow" of December alongside palm trees flapping in sixty-degree breezes, and that's layer two of fakery--absurdity, really. On those grounds, I guess the notion of the "California Christmas" is pretty offensive.

Speaking of which, the City of Oakland is going to be holding a series of "sleigh-rides" in a decorated pontoon boat on Lake Merritt this coming weekend. Those private gondola rides around the lake, by contrast, cost something like $60 (you'd only want to do that on your honeymoon, and who'd honeymoon in Oakland?), but this holiday production is on the city's tab. You only pay $5, and you sing carols and get treated to hot cocoa afterward. Or was that hot cider? The city isn't publicizing this event online, that I can find, but has distributed paper flyers.

Yes, the fakery is over-the-top. It's certainly not going to be lost on intelligent young children, who are just bound to ask questions.

Calling a decorated pontoon boat a "sleigh," indeed.

Most of us adults don't mind the climate-fakery in the California Christmas celebration, as long as we're not already too offended by the holiday itself. Most kids, after it's explained to them, don't really mind it, either.

If we locals want to get away from climate-fakery, without slamming the door on the Christmas holiday altogether, the older, Latino neighborhoods of the Bay Area offer sumptuous seasonal displays that include blossoms. In terms of the local climate, warmer-weather holiday decor with roots in California's Spanish-Mexican past is certainly more authentic than resin-acrylic "icicles."

But the Yankee culture that came to California with statehood isn't going away, and neither are the holiday trappings that felt "right" to Northeasterners and Northern Europeans. The fake snow and the silly songs about "sleigh rides," we will always have with us.

It's all kind of funny, and look at it one way, that's a good thing. The humor of the synthetic-snow-and-palm-trees is like the "spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down." Well, if it's this goofy, a cultural display with a misbegotten religious celebration at its core can't be so offensive.

You also wonder about the role of humor in the earliest adoption of Christian Yule traditions--at least I do. It would have derived from incongruity. The feast of Saturnalia usurped by replicas of a baby born in a barn?

The social and political dynamics were entirely different back in those days, they can't be compared to whatever politics underlie the Christmas-snow-in-California. The need of the early post-Roman rulers to force their religion on the masses was real. The humor, if it played a part, only greased the wheels of the propaganda.

Now, about that "sleigh" ride tomorrow. It's pretty zany, I can't believe the city would spend money on the seasonal charter of a garland-bedecked pontoon boat.

I'm looking forward to it, though. I don't think I've been out on Lake Merritt in a boat since college--half a lifetime ago--when I worked out with the crew team.

For the chance to sing holiday favorites--which was supposed to be part of the $5-package, remember--I've always rather enjoyed Oh, Come All Ye Faithful and Hark, the Herald Angels.

But I draw the line at Frosty, the Snowman.
5:53:55 PM    comment []