Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I really should be ashamed of myself. Given that I often feel shame when it is not even necessary, you can imagine the agony that I am putting myself through now. Shortly after its inception, this log fell into disuse, in spite of all the publicity I attempted to generate for it and all the gasping, grasping masses of readers that I just know have ever yearned for a daily dose of me. I let it fall by the wayside and I have nobody to blame but myself. However I will now attempt to shift some of that blame onto the so-called Holiday Season.

I have always tried to maintain that I was largely unaffected by the “Holiday Season”, either in sentiment or in the pragmatic. I don’t even like the term Holiday Season. In the grand days of yesteryear when holidays were the province of the Church, as they should be, and not of advertising companies, there were all manner of holidays, feasts, fasts and observances no matter the time of year. At best, Christmas ought to be a mildly jubilant Day of Obligation with an intense period of fasting leading up to it. Truth be told, I found myself more excited by the third Sunday of Advent given that this day requires a color of vestments, a pinkish lavender, not seen any other time of the year. I was awed by an exquisite fiddleback chasuble that adorned the priest performing the mass that day; a muted pink it was, all covered over with gold brocade and with a hand painted medallion depicting the face of Our Lord in the centre of the back. Yes, it was glorious, but I digress. In spite of the conspicuously lackadaisical attitude that I adopt during throughout essentially the entire month of December, this year I found myself inexorably caught up in the whole mess. Having now two children as where I previously had none would appear to be the cause of it, so far as I can tell. I am proud to say that my two children seemed about as indifferent to the secular American holiday hoopla as I ever was. In their young lives, the closest thing they have ever experienced to holiday magic have been my yearly readings aloud of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. This, however, was not to remain the way of things. In spite of all of my efforts, I do have relatives; not a single one of the sharing in my beliefs or perspectives. The made it their mission in inundate my son and daughter with as much tinsel draped hullabaloo as they were able with an unending barrage of parties, Santa sitting-ons, and gift givings. Against the onslaught of so many tasteless Scandinavian-American customs, not even I could stand. I resolved to let my in-laws have my poor offspring, taking comfort in the fact that I had the rest of a new year to remold them back into my own stodgy image. Even then, I was not spared. I can’t merely expect my children to go to these things by themselves, though I did try to suggest that at first. No, I was the one to take them to all these damned functions. Worst of all when I was there, those jubilant troglodytes attempted to draw me into all of their carrying-on. As though my being there at all was not enough. The result of all of this ended up being that nearly all I managed to do over the Christmas Season was to celebrate, and not in the somber, scary, religious way that I prefer to celebrate things. I was left with little time for anything else, this log included. Nevertheless, that is all over now. My time is, mainly, my own again. Best of all, I have secured for myself a position in the reference section of a local library which seems to have, in the midst of answering all manner of wonderful book related questions, left me with more oppertunity to write than I have had in quite some time. My output thus far has been both surprising and gratifying and I see no reason why I should not redevote some of these energies to fulfilling the reading needs of my public. So let it be written. So let it be done.