November and December are my favorite times of the annual trip around the Sun. I love walking in my woods in the cold air and during the long evenings I love reading a good book by the fire while enjoying one of my treasured briar pipes.
Since I have no television, I automatically avoid the cacophony of seasonal advertising and schmaltzy or otherwise ridiculous video presentations: (Ernest just will have to save Christmas without me again this year). I am selective in the Christmas music to which I listen. I do relish Christmas programs on old time radio (to my mind the availability of OTR programs on the internet somewhat excuses the crap also found there) so while that may not really be an escape from the season, it is an escape from the 21st Century which is good enough for me.
I am not religious nor am I anti-religious. Some years I decide to attend a Christmas Eve service (usually at one of the major old-line churches; full of pageantry and tradition and Bach
).
I have always liked Fred's speech in Christmas Carol: "There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew; "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round--apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that--as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open
their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"............... Now the folks from the Marketing or Finance departments may not be included in this enumeration but as i said, I am selective. After all were Scrooge alive today, he would probably own Amazon and a whole slew of broadcast media.