For many years, I have been a bit of a Scrooge about Christmas. This isn’t out of any direct dislike for the time of year, but rather for all of the chaos and high-stress emotions that seem to follow it. Every year, all I see are people racing to fill present requests, visit family, hit the office party, cook the perfect Christmas dinner while still attempting to carry a full load of year-end work in their professional lives. With all the activity and stress, people wind themselves into a frazzled mess that doesn’t fully settle until the bitter winds of January are well in swing. Even worse, Christmas and its associated holidays tend to focus our attention on the most unfortunate aspects of our lives. It reminds us of how little we have, how strapped we are for time, and how lonely we can feel. This, it seems to me, is not the best reason to have a holiday.
All of that is true, of course. Nothing stated above is exactly news to anyone who looks around during the holidays. What I wasn’t as willing to admit, though, is that it is also a frighteningly comfortable rationalization. The plain truth is that I used to love this holiday even with all of its associated stress and struggle. Taking aim at the stress caused by season may have afforded me a position of rational strength, but it hid something deeper. For me, something had changed.
This year, as I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, I began to realize what that change was. My epiphany was born from the fact that this is the first time in my life that I have ever returned somewhere. Usually, I just move on. Being here, now, is the closest I will ever have to coming home. Most of my childhood was spent in Minnesota. I grew up with a single mother and money was always hard to come by. Our struggles did not end with the arrival of Christmas. Nothing magically changed. Oh, we never starved and my mother was always able to get something for us under the tree, but presents were never the highlight of the holiday. Our highlights came from an entirely different source and for me, well, it’s something I never thought about before. My mother happened to be a devout Christian and she was determined that we understand that Christ was the center of the holiday. She understood that denying us Santa or cursing the secular aspects of the season would only push us away. Instead, she merely included aspects of her own that settled in next to Santa and were every bit as important to us as the Christmas tree. She treated us to a series of recorded stories about Christmas from a special set designed just for the holidays. Every night we would gather, mark down the days until Christmas and listen to another story. Then as the days grew closer the celebrations both at home and in the Church would increase. For me, Christmas meant midnight candlelight services, songs and chants, and all the assorted ritual that my protestant church felt was appropriate.
And there, there was the difference. Christmas used to be about connection. Connection reinforced through rituals that stretched back through the ages. There was meaning in that. A meaning that I had lost.
Of course, I am not the same boy I once was and while I confess a deep appreciation for the sense of ritual and history the Church provides, I cannot say I am ready to throw aside my own hard-learned lessons and return. Instead, I am seeking to reconnect with that sense of ritual. Perhaps, in this return there is also a chance at finding a way to see these holidays as a moment of celebration and relaxation. Rather than panicking about the small things or worrying about the physical pieces of detritus that fill up our lives, I am content to spend the day with my wife in quiet contemplation remembering a year that had it shares of victories and losses. I will think of my mother and my father and theirs before them. I will remember the past and welcome the future.
And all of a sudden, I am not feeling as Scrooge-like anymore.
Happy Holidays to you all!
This has been a trying time, but as with all trying times, I have learned a few things about who and what I am.
So I have a bit of a confession to make. For all the fantastic literature I have read in my time, I still have a special place in my heart for those old choose-your-own-adventure style books. That’s right! I loved those crazy, stilted stories that paused at random points to give the reader a choice between two similarly misguided options that only slightly make sense in the larger scheme of the plot. As hokey as they were, these little books were more than mere stories. They were mazes of text. I would find one ending only to turn back to the previous “choice” page, carefully indexed by another finger until the very act of reading the book became a feat of manual dexterity. Eventually, I would find my way through all the twists and turns of the story until I knew every option by heart.
Privacy: Balance between the extremes.
October 18th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Now here’s the thing.
I believe in privacy. I believe that tracking where a person goes and what a person does and then using or sharing that data is a violation of privacy. I also believe that creating a web site or some connected device that gives the appearance of privacy but which, in reality, leaks data all over the place is also a violation of privacy. These actions occur often without user knowledge and can be potentially serious.
I tend to think it silly, though, when people want to post publicly and then expect that the data will not be tracked. The Internet does remember. That is its nature. Anything you post publicly will remain and can be found and tracked. I don’t find this some egregious violation of user privacy. Rather, I find this to be the fact of the medium.
It is easy to find radicals on all sides of the privacy debate. Right now, I have been reading the heavy pro-privacy groups. While I agree with a huge portion of what they say, it is easy to leap from practical personal privacy to something bordering on the bizarre. That’s a place that I don’t want to go to. There has to be balance between privacy and sharing. After all, most of us post online in an attempt to communicate and share.
I suppose my ultimate belief is in full disclosure. I believe a user has the right to know, in clear terms, what is being tracked, what is accessible and by who, and what rights they give up by creating the account. After that, it is purely buyer beware. Yes, we need better education when it comes to privacy risks online, but let’s not pretend that the medium isn’t any different from our other mediums. We need to find ways to live with the technology we have and still protect user privacy in practical ways. It can be a fine line sometimes, but I think finding that balance is a far better option than any of the alternatives.