Christmas season is too much of a disruption

Erwin Anderson, RIP. He was always so uplifting with his presence. He was uniquely brightening. Unfortunately I got fooled on the date for his funeral. When I saw that his funeral was going to be on Saturday at 11 a.m., I assumed it would be for the upcoming Saturday. The time interval would have been right.
Upon getting to the church about 20 minutes prior to the scheduled time, I knew something was wrong because there were hardly any cars. I found someone inside who enlightened me. He said that he, too, had initially thought the funeral was going to be on that day. This type of thing happened to us with the Tom McRoberts funeral too. There was a delay for some reason.
In the case of Erwin, I asked around in the days following and I heard that the first Saturday was scrubbed because it was so close to Christmas. Christmas Eve was Sunday night and Christmas was on Monday. But the funeral would have been on Saturday. I felt a little exasperated as I wondered: can't any normal business in our lives be handled on a day outside of the Christmas Eve/Christmas Day window? Does everything have to halt so completely?
This brings to mind the quite fine op-ed in the Star Tribune during the holiday season this year. The writer may have come across like Scrooge but his message resonated with me. He finds the Christmas holiday season too disrupting. He wonders why our normal routine has to be upended so completely. Turn on the TV and much of the normal timely stuff is pushed aside in favor of recycled material, guest hosts etc. I push buttons on the remote rather frantically. I feel some relief if I can just find an old Star Trek episode.
What about football? Glad you asked. This brings to mind another recent op-ed in the Strib that pleads most logically for us to boycott the sport, for the obvious reason of what the sport does to the health of the players. So I barely pay attention to football anymore.
Every year I resolve to bring a stack of my old Christmas CDs from the basement and play them. And I never do. These were CDs I once played at the Sun Tribune shop late at night when I was often the only one there. I played them loud. I considered playing them right after Thanksgiving. You might think I'd be charmed listening to them again. I dabbled a bit one year and felt empty, I suspect because I associated all this music with an earlier time in my life. The music belonged then, not now. Same with my Jack Benny New Year's Eve DVD. Maybe someday I'll consume all this again. It doesn't appeal to me now.
Any other reasons for backing off on Christmas? We hear Donald Trump say it's OK to say "Merry Christmas" again, as if Barack Obama had prohibited it. I remember Bill O'Reilly's constant screed about how Christmas was being suppressed in our society. O'Reilly has been sent to the backwaters due to the $32 million he paid to a woman to avoid a sexual harassment suit. I don't want him to be some sort of lesson on behalf of what Christmas represents. Ditto Trump with his admissions of sexual assault from the "Access Hollywood" tape.
I am rather depressed by Christmas. An increasing percentage of the population is people like me who either live alone or with one other person. Advancing age may well have reduced the family contacts we might renew at Christmas. Thus we are susceptible to feeling depressed at that holiday time which is put forward as a celebration of a big, robust family from the infants to the grandparents. Lots of home-cooked food, right? With our family (Mom and I), we just have to be sure when Willie's is open so we might get our usual essential food items - pretty minimal, like a prepared sandwich from the deli.
I am writing this post on New Year's. I grabbed breakfast where I heard the waitress answer phone calls from people wondering what their hours were on that holiday. A disrupted routine. We might have suspected that the restaurant is closed completely. The phone calls indicated that people really do appreciate "the routine" where the restaurant would be open.
I am exasperated by the whole stretch of time between mid-December and New Year's, as I struggle to find some sort of stimulation for my mind. It is a matter of just surviving it, and now we're just hours from proceeding on to January 2 when hopefully we'll land on our feet with that sense of normalcy. I can watch Joe and Mika (hopefully) live at 5 a.m. on MSNBC. We can get back to the daily talk about how President Trump is outrageous and most likely dangerous.
We did not go back to church for the "real" day of Erwin Anderson's funeral, sorry. I didn't go back for Tom McRoberts' either and that was a shame because I heard that my father's "UMM Hymn" was performed.
Don't worry, my family will never again prompt people to consider attending a funeral, because we are done with funerals. If my mother passes on before me, her soul will immediately go to heaven which is all that matters. If the funeral is meant for my benefit, you can skip it. I don't think Rich Moen would appreciate anything being done for my benefit. I was a "miserable failure" in his eyes. But I do plug away in my life.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com