Celebrating Life
Human being like to celebrate. We celebrate births and deaths and everything in between. The biggest ones tend to be around marriage, holidays and the ubiquitous birthday celebrations. Many of us have occasionally grown weary of some of the celebrations. In a large work team, celebrating every person’s birthday and special events could take up an inordinate amount of time and resources so they are either foregone or done in bulk every month as part of an overall morale-boosting effort. People all react differently to celebrations. Some people love them and some people do all they can to avoid them. I’m guess in its all about how any of us sit on the optimism/pessimism spectrum. If we are joyous people we like being able to celebrate our friends or family. If we are more curmudgeon than optimist, we grumble some version of “Bah, humbug!” in good Dickensian fashion. For some it is a budgetary issue, but I tend to reject that as a rationale since good wishes can be passed in non-monetary manner. As my mother always used to say to us when we were growing up poor, “make a card!” You can also lead everyone in a hearty song of congratulations or Happy Birthday and that always makes the honored person feel good. There are many people (occasionally myself included) that suggest that they prefer not to have a celebration for something as mundane as an odd-year birthday. They might genuinely prefer not to be the center of attention either because they do not care to draw attention to their age or other accomplishments or because they are generally shy. But we must all remember that celebrations are not just for the object of the celebration, but also for those who want to show reverence to that person. People generally feel good at celebrations and to deny them that or pour cold water on their good wishes and efforts is perhaps more selfish than not. Generally, I feel it is better to be gracious and humble and let things happen as people wish them to.
All that said and done, it may be hard for us to always stay properly up-to-date on the celebration schedule. Today’s calendars are pretty smart and tend to put special events in whether we want them there or not. I have some old colleagues’ birthdays noted in my calendar and at a loss as to how to eliminate them despite my best efforts. So, some dates pop up and are hard to miss, but still others jump up and bite us at the last minute or go by unnoticed.
But no one can suggest that they don’t know about the normal holiday schedule. Christmas does not exactly sneak up on any of us. Religious affiliation notwithstanding, some of us like to celebrate the season boldly. The most obvious way is through decorating the house and grounds. We all know the stories of the people who overdo the house decorating. National Lampoon took perhaps the best swing at it with Christmas Vacation, where Chevy Chase turns his suburban home into a beacon from outer space and sends the electric grid into overdrive. That hyperbole is not so very far from the truth in almost every neighborhood in America with someone escalating their home decoration for one reason or another to the point of extreme garishness and a great deal of added electric bill charges. When I look at those houses I can’t imagine the effort it must take to set up the lighting and the equal or greater effort needed to take it all down after the season, whether you define that as Twelfth Night or some late winter date when the neighbors start to comment. I see how it can happen that one thing leads to another. Just this year we have added considerably to the amount of timed lights on the entry to our house and grounds. We are still far away from the extremes we all think of, but it certainly can accumulate over time. In our case, we have lights down at the entrance, lights on the small coniferous trees next to the garage, lights defining the Sailshade, and lights on the boulder-clinging cactus. I have also bought a new laser light show device that I plan to attach to my 12V system and have it set to shine up into the boughs of the palo verde trees.
We went for dinner with my sister Kathy and her husband Bennett last night. The topic of decorations came up because we so admired their green laser light (the prompt for my recent purchase). Kathy showed us pictures of a neighborhood house that looks very much like a Chevy Chase special and told us how to find it for when we were heading home. We drove past it and it is every bit as spectacular as it looked in the pictures. Additionally, the house next door has decided to give chase to this over-the-top display and they too have gone crazy with outdoor lighting. Theirs is less random and somewhat more tasteful, but you can’t go to these extremes and not cross a line into garishness no matter what you do. Nevertheless, no matter what we might say or tsk about, its always fun to seen these lighting displays and it feels very much in the holiday spirit to drive around to find and compare them. Everyone draws the line somewhere on holiday decorations. Christmas is clearly the leader, followed closely by Halloween. The others are Valentines Day, and Independence Day. Not too many people go crazy with President’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day or even Thanksgiving Day.
Back in the birthday celebration category, this is rarely a cause for home decoration other than normal party favors. We are going tonight for dinner to Mike & Melisa’s and it is Melisa’s 60th birthday. For Kim’s 60th we did our big Hearst Castle bash that will never be forgotten, so I think its fair to say that we think it’s a big deal to celebrate such a milestone of life. Mike let it be known that they do not celebrate birthdays. This was not a surprise to us since Mike is generally a low-key guy who is not much on holiday gifts , when we travel, not so much on celebrations or souvenirs. One might make the mistake of thinking this is about being fiscally tight, but I suspect that it is more about keeping life simple and uncluttered, which Mike clearly prefers overall in his lifestyle. Their home is not Spartan by any means, but there is a sense of simplicity and uncluttered style that comes through clearly. Mike made it very clear that he did not want us to make a big deal out of Melisa’s birthday and that no presents were in order.
Kim and I had the same reaction to that mandate. We both said to hell with that. We feel the need to celebrate Melisa’s milestone birthday and we want to celebrate it, decorate for it and give presents for it. We have made sure to telegraph our intentions so as to avoid any bad surprises and especially to bring friends Faraj and Yasuko into the plan so that we are all on the same wavelength. I went to Party City and stocked up on hats and 60-year-old decorations including a huge “60” mylar helium balloon. Kim went out and bought Melisa a nice cashmere pashmina and I bought her a gift certificate for a tool from Harbor Freight. We feel those gifts represents the two major dimensions of who Melisa is and the decorations and celebratory jazz is a reflection of how much we enjoy Melisa and want to celebrate her life with her.