At the most basic level winter is cold and cold weather kills off anything that might otherwise be lingering on.

(Except for squirrels, dandelions and morons. They’re immortal.)

My point is, it seems very natural to equate winter and its holidays with death.

And I know there are parts of the world where December is balmy but who can account for such places anyway?

Still, in recent days I’ve been met with the obituaries of Christopher Hitchens, Vaclev Havel, Joe Simon, Kim Jong Il and, for a few minutes, Jon Bon Jovi who quickly recovered.

I also learned Friday night of the suicide six years ago of a college friend I used to act with. Obviously we’d lost touch, but this is now the second person with whom I was once good friends who chose to leave early.

These are notches I’d prefer not to cut.

I’m otherwise having a great season, working a lot and enjoying the matchless good fortune of having a healthy family and no bad stuff near the horizon.

I don’t really know why I’m posting this except maybe to offer the idea that the holidays don’t need to be so bad if you don’t go in expecting them to be perfect, by your standards or anyone else’s.

Suck it, Martha Stewart.

Last thought:

When I really began to consciously part from the seasonal myths I’d been raised with I realized that, for all the satisfaction I took from being grown-up and done kidding myself, I still could feel a pang at the pretty trappings of lights and song and once a year food. The person I’d become was the sole surviving heir to the kid who’d once sung carols and been an archangel in the Christmas play. It was embarrassing, but also reassuring that I hadn’t become completely unsentimental.

Sometime between then and now a guy once asked me if I’d rather be happy or right.

I picked at that one for a long time until I realized there was no reason I couldn’t be both.

Happy holidays.

Wishing you Jack for the holidays!

Either that or they’re the lame community colleges where they stick everyone who couldn’t go anywhere else.  Let’s look at the saints for today and see if they offer a clue.

1. Saint Demetrius (of Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia). Demetrius was missionary who got martyred in Serbia around 300 AD.  He’s sort of the Saint Death for anyone living in the Balkans. If you want Divine Sanction for going genocidal on any foreigner (or native) in that region Saint Demetrius is the guy to talk to.

2. Saint Pelagia (of actresses).  Saint Pelagia has more origin stories than Spider-Man.  There appear to have been no fewer than three different Saint Pelagiae, the latter two of whom died to protect their “virtue”, the surest way for a girl to fast track that Sainthood career FYI.  The one who gets October 8th however was a performer (if you know what I mean) in Antioch. The local Bishop happened to catch her act, most likely when he stopped in for a glass of water or perhaps to ask for directions. The next day he mentioned her in his sermon, making note of her devotion to her craft and high production values. And who should be among the parishioners but the future saint herself! No doubt she had stopped in merely to return a lost glove or to thank the bishop for the tip, but upon hearing the sermon she offered to get baptized and give all her money to the church.

The bishop’s arm sufficiently twisted, the future saint donned male drag and moved to Jerusalem where she lived out her days as “Pelagius the Beardless Monk” and her nights as None of Your Business.

We might scoff at the lengths to which she went but she was probably the first actress to keep working past forty.

3. Saint Thais (of fallen women). Didn’t we cover this with Saint Pelagia?

Sort of. It’s the same plot only the details are worse. Saint Thais was a fourth century Egyptian whore who made the mistake of talking to a monk. He wheedled her into burning all her clothes, giving him all her jewels and moving into a convent where they starved and dehydrated her for three years in a cell with no toilet. They finally let her out and she died.

Many centuries later the French made fun of her.

4. Saint Triduana (invoked against eye disease). Warning: Brace yourselves.

Saint Triduana was a Benedictine abbess. One day a Scottish clan chieftain fell in love with her beautiful eyes so she tore them both out and sent them to him.

So I think we can conclude that the heavenly calendar has October 8th set aside for extra helpings of violence and misogyny. Amen.

(Seriously, how does anyone, let alone a woman, come out of this culture as anything but a paranoid, self-hating loon?)

Saint Triduana: She only has eyes for you.

Yes, I would enforce this if given the power.

And a lot of ammunition…

You know it's true.

We’ll start with Saint Joseph because Finnbar was way more interesting.

Joseph was a Spanish lawyer and priest who founded a free school for poor kids in Rome in 1597.  He died in 1648 and was made a Saint 300 years later. The End.

By contrast, Saint Finnbar was the sort of super-hero Saint that only Ireland can produce.  He did lots of miracles, including flying,driving off giant snakes, raising the dead and making Jesus Christ appear and take his hand which then gave off rays of light for the remainder of his life.

It is said when Finnbar died the sun didn’t set for two weeks, but it was Ireland so how could you tell?

Credit as always to “Saints Preserve Us!: Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You’ll Ever Need” by Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers.

I still thank him periodically because it made growing up into atheism less difficult. Plus, I never got raped by any of Christ’s Servants on Earth.  I’m grateful on both counts.

Still, I have a small interest in my heritage and so I’m working my way through an entertaining and enlightening book called “Saints Preserve Us!: Everything You Need to Know About Every Saint You’ll Ever Need” by Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers.  I loved their other book “Who in Hell…: A Guide to the Whole Damned Bunch” so I ordered “Saints” off Amazon and so should you.  Both books have confirmed my suspicion that Judeo-Christianity is little more than a crude version of the Super-Friends vs. The Legion of Doom but with a more extreme set of secret headquarters.

With all that preamble out of the way I wish to note that the Patron Saint of today, September 24th,  is Gerard of Hungary.  Among Saint Gerard’s more notable acts was walking from Venice to Hungary wearing only a pair of wooden clogs, which must have been both uncomfortable and chilly.  I’ll bet nobody stopped him though.

He was also a wine connoisseur who took lepers to his bed, I’m guessing after they each had a few bottles of the finest.  He died after being attacked by the soldiers of an evil Duke who threw stones at his carriage. He made the sign of the cross which caused all the stones to levitate in mid-air.  Apparently he couldn’t figure out what sign to make to hurl the stones back at the soldiers so they dragged him out and martyred him.

Still, good trick as far as it went…

So today at my son’s after-school Tae Kwon Do class he was told by the Christian kids that he shouldn’t celebrate Christmas because he doesn’t believe in god.

He was told this a lot, to the point that he told me he didn’t want to go back tomorrow, the last day before the holiday break. It took me a while to get this all out of him but once I got it straight I decided his instructor and I needed to come to an understanding about what was acceptable back-and-forth among kids and what was not. Dinner could wait.

I explained what happened and what the belief demographics were like in my household and I think we got it all squared away.  His instructor is a very nice Korean man, my age, Catholic, with solid English as a second language even if I had to run the word “atheist” by him a few times.

What he understands is that a talk with the class about respecting the beliefs of others  is in order, even if he’s nervous about religion being involved.  As an occasional teacher I’ve dealt with parents of faith myself and understand the thin veneer of Not Crazy some of them have to apply each morning before facing the Earth People.

What my son understands is that, for some of these kids, he might literally be the first person they’ve ever met who says he doesn’t believe in god. He understands that even though some of these kids are older than him they aren’t necessarily any smarter and they damn sure aren’t always right. He understands that you should stand up for what you believe in, as well as for what you don’t.

He understands, I hope, that his dad has got his back.  (His real dad, not the one in the sky.)

Maybe the best part of this awkwardness was that he got to hear from his dad the atheist and his teacher the Catholic that “religion can lead people to do wrong things.”

And that’s why we need to learn Tae Kwon Do.

Oh, yeah!  Ballot research for the next election! In two days!

For now, I’ll just say that if the people I encountered on the mall yesterday were running our government our troubles would be over very soon. A smarter, funnier, more decent bunch of people have seldom been seen in one place.

If the Beck/Palin folks were running our government our troubles would also be over but only because they’d end up launching nukes while trying to figure out the copy machine.

The polls say the baggers are going to take over the House of Representatives and replace our first female Speaker of the House with an orange guy who consciously campaigns on behalf of a man who likes dressing up like a Nazi. This in turn will allow a two-bit hustler who made a fortune selling car alarms and his reputation ousting Gray Davis for Arnold Schwarzenegger to start subpoenaing members of the Obama administration for trying to give kids healthcare.

This is cause for despair.

But I choose to look at this as an aberration made possible by an electorate scared by a lousy economy and a nonstop bullshit machine in every home, office and car.

Sooner or later the economy will get better and the bullshit will be recognized as such.  And the people on the mall yesterday will still be there ready to extend a hand to the people who wake up from the spell, embarrassed and wondering what they were thinking.

Being kind and funny and open to new information are not liabilities. Neither is refusing the bait to be angry. Neither is being happy and grateful when you’ve got good reasons to fear. These are symptoms of robust emotional health.

As long as we don’t become them we will eventually be okay.

However I’d rather be okay sooner so please vote and try to talk your crazier friends and relatives into voting for non-baggers.  We outnumbered them on the mall by a good margin.  Maybe we can do it again at the polls.

Good night.

Common courtesy goes a long way.

My in-laws (this set) are philosophy/ethics professors who nonetheless see no moral conflict in letting someone like me be a father to their grandchildren and occasional housekeeper with benefits to their beautiful daughter. I suppose I’m one of those more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their profession.

It was a cold, wet, muddy day of exactly the sort I would choose to welcome teabaggers to my hometown, but enough about those idiots. There was great food and two new puppies to run around and lick my kids to mixed responses.  Along for the show were a colleague of my father-in-law’s visiting from France and his wife, a professor of contemporary history whose true passion was the historical cycle of women’s oppression and liberation.  She was still learning English and relied on her husband to translate some of the larger mouthfuls of both our languages.

The kids were variously delightful, horrible, entertaining and sick and by the time we got to dessert I felt compelled to ask our visitors (parents of four boys now grown) which children were more spoiled, French or American.

After a diplomatic pause she allowed that American children could claim the title.

Yes! Number Une!

Soon after we all parted bon amis and headed home.  My wife and I got the kids defused and eventually made it to our sofa to enjoy some PBS-enabled time travel, watching the Three Tenors kick it in a post-World Cup concert from 1990 in front of moonlit Roman ruins.

I am a well-bred ape living in such material and intangible abundance that it seems like sci-fi.  Distance, language and time itself is all pushed around to create one exhilarating day for a schmoe like me who married well.

This should not be taken for granted. Not ever.

Happy 9-12.