The Holidays

Holidays. I had a pretty good set of holidays because I got out of town and up to the farmhouse retreat I co-own up in the Ottawa valley. Just four days away, but what a difference it makes, no electricity, no plumbing, just a lot of woodburning and skiing and good wholesome meals by candlelight.

To make my overworked biker's body even happier, I didn't deliver anything for about nine days in a row. That made being back on the road come the new year feel vastly better; its called recovery time for a goddamned reason isn't it? My new year's resolution is to work only four days a week - Workless Wednesdays here I come!

After overhearing a few dozen office/elevator conversations about the stressbag mess that Xmas causes the citizens of Christiandom, it made me reflect on the work-mad nature of our fabulous Northernish European-derived culture. In some countries it is not unknown to have six weeks of paid holidays per year. Yes, that's correct, six weeks. But we couldn't handle such a thing here (especially here in Protestant Hogtown), because holidays are so incredibly stressful, what with the annual explosion of over-consumption that is the Xmas season.

Its such a fine piece of industrial society conspiracy: let the masses exhaust themselves with celebration fatigue so that they are positively relieved to get back to the calming rhythms of the daily grind. Instead of the craziness of Carnival in Brazil or the month long festival in Valencia, Spain which culminates in a huge blast of TNT and giant puppet-burning in the city square, or the Tomatino (a huge, drunken tomato fight in public), there isn't a real release of collective tension at Xmas. Its more like the opposite, an increase through the added traffic, parties and dinners to plan, and the miseries of gift-buying, all in the midst of the usual workload until 24 December. Then there is all the work and stress of organizing vacations to faraway, calmer places, which may or may not be combined with the Xmas/New Year holidays.

But don't you all know all this already? Of course you do, but that's what our overdeveloped industrial-consumer society is for, the exclusive use of time for relentless productivity, no matter how useless or destructive it may be.