Christmas, We Hardly Knew Ye!

I took my dogs out at noon today for a Christmas walk at Percy Warner Park, and on the drive home passed the old model airplane field where Nashvillians dump their Christmas trees so the city can shred them into mulch.

How strange it was then to see a large pile of trees already discarded by people whose main mission on Christmas morning was not sitting around opening presents or eating brunch or looking at the pretty lights, but was instead pulling down the tree, stuffing it in the car trunk, and tossing it on the pile at the park.

How does a holiday so anticipated and so all encompassing end so abruptly at midnight on Christmas Eve? What happened to the Twelve Days of Christmas?

Of no interest to anyone these days- for the presents have been given and the shopping, except for the returns, is done for. And was not the shopping the point?

Tomorrow morning the music, which I feel is the true glory of the season, will disappear. The dumpsters will overflow, and Christmas 2012 will slip into the quicksand of forgetting.

Enter then the top ten lists for the past year, and the roll call of dead 2012 celebrities. Soon to be followed by wall to wall info-mercials for exercise machines.

And so Christmas ends- not with a bang, but a whimper-