prompt: mass, title: thanks a lot in misc. flash fiction

One of the more overlooked difficulties with the structure of American culture is the way we lay out our holidays. Folks act like holidays are inviolate pillars of historical and societal constancy, even though we’re just making this up as we go along, and always have been. When I was a wee wad of barely-ambulatory flesh, some states still wouldn’t celebrate Dr. King, places still hadn’t fused Lincoln and Washington into Presidents’ Day. Easter and Thanksgiving are floating feasts, attached to days of week, not calendar dates. Christ’s Mass itself, our family used to remove our December 25th tree on January 8th-ish, in honor of Russian Orthodox ancestors on Dad’s side, as many traditions can’t agree on dates. Let alone the fact it’s likely the historical Jesus was born in August, but hell, Rome already had a big December party why not just absorb that? Consider the lilies in the field, they waste not, want not. Utilize existing infrastructure! Go green!

We don’t take the tree down at Russian Christmas anymore, now that it’s a fake tree anyway. We just swap Christmas bulbs for Valentine’s Day ventricles, before affixing on Ostara’s ornamental ova, before finally tossing the arboreal simulacra back in the garage, sometime mid-May. To crib Ovid, omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. Times change. We change with them. To crib The Shawshank Redemption instead, either get busy adapting or get busy dying. Whichevs. As of my writing, it’s still a free country. Get your self-determination while it’s still hot.

But it’s the nonsensical order of the middle-autumn holidays that really mess with me. Betwixt and between Labor Day and Christmas, it’s just a disorganized mess and thematically mangled on top of that. On Hallowe’ens, we take off metaphorical masks and don literal ones, mingling with manifestations of our horrors and fears to blow away the darkness of the dying times, via the powers of candy and beer and mockery and weirdly-sexualized costumes of old children’s
media properties. It’s bad enough you want to make Sonic the Hedgehog hot but no one needs ALF to have a great gaping valley of breast-cleavage. Again, though, it’s a free country, TBD.

And that is the rub. We confront and resolve ourselves to ghosts and ghoulies, the big catharsis end-cap to the death of the summer sun only to a week or so later face down the actual real-life horror of Election Day. Creatures more gruesome than any vampire, shoving their dull slogans
and makeup-caked mugs into our very houses. Calling for the murder or expulsion of whatever oppressed group is fashionable to condemn to death this week, with Cheshire smiles and pleas for money all the while. The fall of human civilization, wrapped up inside a toothpaste advert. Shouldn’t the comical celebrations of exhaling after avoiding existential crisis come after that instead? And then, three weeks later after all that tumult, only then they tell us to give thanks.

Were we only able to take a holiday from our holidays.