Tag Archives: Caveman Christmas

Feel The Love

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I was doing some serious channel surfing the other night when I came across the Hallmark Channel. I usually surf right on by, but I was feeling Christmasy and a Christmas movie was on (what are the odds?) so I gave it a quick minute.

Apparently there’s more than a handful of the Hallmark Faithful out there, as the network churns out roughly 800,000 new Christmas movies a year (maybe an embellishment, maybe not). The new films add to their trillions of existing ones, sure to be running on a never-ending loop until the End of Time. They’re all pretty much the same movie of course, with different actors and characters’ names on rotation. I was barely a minute into the one I was checking out (and already having viewer’s remorse) when it hit me:

Hallmark Christmas movies are just the television equivalent of romance novels, with some holiday cheer sprinkled in for good measure.

You’d think I would’ve remembered. Ha! It’d be great if they occasionally put out a Christmas movie that was about…oh Idk…the meaning of Christmas or sumthin? Or hey, maybe some that are all about dogs or circus clowns or anything other than the constant deluge of Paperback Love. When did Cupid hijack Christmas anyway?

After a moment of pondering all this, I realized I was still holding the remote, and that I have access to far more channels and streaming services than a cavedude needs. A couple minutes of professional scrolling later, I hit the jackpot with the 1965 classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that had just started on another channel.

There’s timeless magic in this Charles Schulz gem, from the storyline (good ‘ol Charlie Brown searching for the real meaning of Christmas), to the soundtrack (the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s jazzy piano-y vibrations are good for the soul) to the throwback to simpler times.

 “I never thought it was a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” – Linus Van Pelt

Christmas Love has a heartbeat, and it sounds a lot like that.

I hope you feel it this holiday season.

A Quick 180

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Alrighty then! Just a day after writing about my complete lack of enthusiasm for early Christmas celebrations / decorations in my previous article “Youltide” last week, I began throwing some decorations up in the cave and did some holiday shopping online. Initially, it wasn’t so much a change of heart as it was simply something borne out of pragmatism – I was home for the extended Thanksgiving weekend anyway…why not get a jump on things rather than put it off? Decorating can take a while and the older I get, the pickier I seem to have gotten when it comes to Christmas Cave decor and placement (which is undoubtedly a good thing).

Somewhere along the way, it became less about being pragmatic and more about embracing the moment – I put on some holiday tunes and had a glass or two of Christmas cheer. I started thinking of Christmases past – from my own youth, to when my kids were little, up to the present day. It occurred to me that over the course of the last 12 years or so, since my divorce, I had kind of conditioned myself into thinking that Christmastime would forever be “less than” – it would never be the same. Never the same when having a broken family, never the same while not having the kids with me all the time due to shared custody, never quite the same as the kids grew older and ventured out on their own. Well of course, as with everything else in life, things change and they simply don’t remain the same.

Does that mean we’re condemned to having a less satisfying life as time goes on? Should we just accept having less contentment? Should we just be always looking at the past?

The obvious answer is a resounding NO, but sometimes it’s the most obvious things that somehow elude us. Sometimes we inadvertently condition our own thinking in negative patterns, and we end up condemning ourselves to a ‘less than’ life, whether it’s during the holidays or year-round. But hey – life can be hard enough on its own without getting any help from us to make it harder.

I must say, realizing that I’ve somewhat sabotaged my holidays all these years was quite the downer at first – until it became quite liberating.

I still have a bit more decorating and shopping to do, but I’m largely done with it all, which is unprecedented for me in early December. For the first time in years, I find myself embracing the Season, as opposed to just looking ahead to the day. What a concept!

Grunt Grunt!