This morning my family held a memorial service for the passing away of Florernce Lane Schmid, known to me as Nana, my grandmother. Pop-Pop seemed to handle it better than we expected, but still broke down on occasion. After all, they had been married sixty-seven years. This is the second time that I have lost a grandparent to Alzheimers, and the second time that a grandparent passed away around Thanksgiving. While the holiday itself has become more enjoyable than it was in childhood. (I never enjoyed the holiday much) it is developing a stigma of death that may be difficult to overcome. The very premise of the holiday to me also seems worthy of anathema; the celebration of feast that preluded the genocide of a people, wherein we thank a god in whom I do not believe. Mayhap a celebration of gratitude to those in our community that help us would be appropriate, but the current practices of the holiday leave me with a bad taste in my mind.
I was all set out to decorate the X-mas tree (more on the abbreviation of X-mas in a bit) when Mom announces that she would like to use a new garland on the tree this year. Mom announced this after Dad and I had already erected the artificial tree in the living room (which delightly has lights already on it that we don't have to remove and put on each year). We haven't bought this garland yet. As the garland must go on before the ornaments we now have a lit up naked X-mas tree in our living room. I'm wondering how soon it will be before this garland makes it on the tree with the impending storm and Mom evidently not interested in going out to get it tonight.
Now, re: that abbreviation of X-mas I mentioned earlier. I heard an interesting snippet of trivia on the radio yesterday. While many people consider the abbreviation a form of slang and disrespectful of the holiday, it turns out that X is actually symbolically of Christ himself after all. X is the Greek letter Chi, a symbol associated with the Christ.
I seem to recall also reading somewhere that the cross in the shape of a lower case 't' was actually representative of Jesus's name. He would have been crucified on a device shaped more like a capital 'T'. Of course eveyone knows that the nails used to crucify him would have actually been hammered through the wrists and not the hands. He would have fallen off the cross if he had been nailed up through the hands.