Mindreading?
Sat., December 18, 03:37 PM
Mindreading costs extra. My previous post was about the winter holidays, which is a natural for this time of year. But when I heard the following piece on the radio Thursday morning, all I could think of was mindreading. Mike Carruthers, with “Something You Should Know,” is on the radio five mornings a week. You can find the transcripts, as I did, on line.
Mike Carruthers:
Christmas is America’s favorite holiday.
Maud Lavin:
Eighty one percent of U.S. households celebrate Christmas with a tree and not everybody’s Christian.
Maud Lavin, editor of the book, The Business of Holidays, says the line between Christmas and Hanukah has gotten very blurry in recent years.
I’m Jewish myself, and I didn’t even know that Purim was more the gift-giving holiday on the Jewish calendar. But, Purim is in the spring, and so “no good,” because it doesn’t participate in the Christmas season, and Jewish Americans especially turned Hanukah from a tiny holiday into a big consumerist holiday.
Kwanzaa is a recent holiday tradition.
That’s also interesting because it started in the seventies as an anti-consumerist and “black power” holiday. But, then, over the years, it’s become assimilated into the black middle class, so it has become a consumerist holiday.
And thanks to Seinfeld, a lot of people actually celebrate Festivus.
Festivus was an invention of Frank, which was George’s father on Seinfeld and had various rituals including the family sitting around the dinning room table together criticizing each other. It was like a great parody. Then Ben & Jerry’s piggybacked on that and had for a while a Festivus ice cream. And, there really are people who continue to celebrate Festivus especially on college campuses.
At SomethingYouShouldKnow.net, I’m Mike Carruthers, and that’s Something You Should Know.
Meanwhile, my friend Julie told me about Divali, the Hindu festival of lights. From what I can find out, that’s a new year’s kind of thing too, a five days of renewal and looking forward. I’m still looking up more information about it.
So that was going to be my Thursday post, and my computer decided it wasn’t going to play. It’s still a little weak, like when you’ve been sick and it’s over but you’re not quite recovered. The mouse keeps dying. My son was here cleaning out the scary things that had gotten into my computer despite the virus protection. We thought the mouse might be a software problem, but it just died again. So I’ll have to find some kind of walk-around, and you will know I did when this actually appears.
