Celebrations☒

hO, hO. Henry story: The pathetic of the Magi (another communication failure)

Not all myths are from ancient peoples. I believe there is an O. Henry story (1905CE) about a male who shows his love for a female by selling his gold watch to buy her an ornament for her hair, while, in parallel, the female sells her long hair to buy an ornament for the male's watch.

Similar to the myth of Œdipus, this is an instance of massively destructive communication failure: Had the two confided their intentions to each other before acting on them, they could have both savored their ethereal love and also retained their worldly treasures, instead of lamenting enjoying their overarching curse blessing in commiseration. ("You, jerk, are a spoil-sport and a kill-joy! You would make life meaningless for everybody! Satan get thee hence!" "Thank you for the high compliment, Sir/Madam. I appreciate the honor of being dubbed a kill-joy: a person who exposes the putrescence of sentimentality to the disinfecting light of reason, just so long as you do not try to effect 'consequences', your Second Amendment rights or other, upon me.")

There is a broader issue here: altruism. If do unto others as you would have them do unto you, if each person sacrificed themself for another, everybody would self-destruct (self-sacrifice) and no good would be done for anyone because there would no longer be anyone to benefit. How about this instead: For each person, get your own human needs met and then have so much to be grateful for that you will want to give back your surplus of blessedness to benefit others? That would be a win-win, and everyone would be elevated. I have quoted a magisterial statement by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein on this point elsewhere: here.

The parents of the two characters in this O. Henry story are indicted in The Hague on the charge of brainwashing children (aka: sentimentalization). How do they plead? Not guilty, by reason of themselves having been childreared (ref.: Alice Miller's books, passim; a variant of insanity defense). +2022.12.04 I have added a One Act play about this: here.

Celebrations☒

I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) actually once saw a meaningful, constructive (both figuratively and literally) celebration: a community house-raising. A whole neighborhood got together and build, in a single day, a very sturdy prefabricated house, but not the el cheapo kind. All very solid hardwood construction just all the timbers had been precut so they had tobe assembled on site. All the men exercised their muscles and their craftsmanly intelligence all day and it was a lovely house they built. The women served food, the children ran around and everybody had a bgood time of it. And the lucky family got a fine new place to live. Alas, not for the end of this lovely story: The owner of the new house wa not a good person: they sold it. Needless to say, the people in the neighterhood who had busted their asses to provide this family with a lovely new home wer not happy about all their good work and good will having gone to a cheat. But that does not distract from the exemplary nature of what they all did. And the people who did it wer enot Amish farmers. the person I was assosciated with was the head of a major university press.

Christmas

Let's compare that with standard issue Christmas decorations. People grow a softwood tree and kill it for the sole purpose of sticking it in a shallow pot of water to slow down its decay in their living room of their often suburban "development" house and gawk at it for a couple weeks and then haul it out to the curb to make extra work for the sanitation engineers aka garbage men. In the interim they load it down with all sorts of trinkets, much of it little electric light bulbs and whoopee doo. To take all those trinkets off the tree and pack them away to thake them abck out 365 or 356 days later to do this all over again. And I have not mentioned that they peobably spent a lot of time and effort stringing more of htese multicolor little electric light bulbs all over the outside of their house ahso some of the shrubbery for the purpose of having to take that all back dowan again too.

Christmas presents are genarally ot self-destructing like in the OHenry story, above. They are often either frivolous things bought to fulfill a requirement to give somebody a Christmax gift, or practical things the person needed anyway, just put incide cute wrapping to get thrown away. More time and effor being exerted to expend more time and energy undoing it or to accomplish nothing.

People digging holes for the sole purpose of everybody seeing they have dug them and then filling them back up again for the sole purpose of everybody seeing they have filled the hole back up. Time and material. Pick a number: $100? And what value do they finally get for their expenditure: $0. Conrast with the houseraising where if they started with $20,000 in material they ended they dy with a $40,000 house and a family can live in it for many years before more people can enjoy living in it....

I always felt taking down decorations was depressing. Going backward. But suppose people "decorated" their houses with meaningful improvements that would not get taken down but be kept and erich their life cgoing forward? Like a staircase, not an obstcle to climb over and back down. The depressing part would be gone. People would always be advancing, npt like Sisyphus doing the same thing over and over getting nowhere. Sometimes there is progress amid the regresses; I say make ther always be all progress and no regresses.

What the shit? Potlatch city.

What celebrations are for

Part of it is surely bribery: Put up with the drudgery of your lif every day and you can have fun occasionally. OH, boy! Thanksgiving dinner! Turkey and all the reimmings! Yummy! ~ How tasty is that turkey, really? And if the pleasure is measured against all the te toil of preparing the meal, is the bottom line a profit or a loss? (I would be pure profit if the whole meal appeared by somebody waving a magic wand and the dirty disnes washed themsleves, but that's not the wayit is.)