The closer Christmas comes, the more I panic. The most abominable holiday I know. The shopping mayhem with all its horrors followed by cold and gray desolation.

Addendum I (December 25, 2024)

Oh, I love this haiku! Even though I do not panic any longer, for panicking is only for the unenlightened, I am simply amazed by this Christian holiday. God’s son is born, but there is nobody around. After a brief gathering in a church, Christians are returning to their homes. Ensconced, they are celebrating the greatest miracle by cooking and stuffing themselves within their families. There is not a sound anywhere around. In my mind, they should celebrate all together in streets and squares with all the joy they could muster. Singing and dancing should be essential to their celebration. Tough luck. Anyhow, Christmas has been a great disappointment in both America and Britain, as well, but Motovun beats all my previous abodes in cold and gray desolation. Now that the hilltown is bereft of most of its inhabitants, the misery is reaching a new pinnacle. Although there has been a good deal of sunshine recently, days are pretty short shortly after the Winter Solstice. Cold and gray desolation marks Christmas on top of the Motovun hill year after year. The pits.

Addendum II (January 6, 2025)

It has taken me a while to understand why Christians are so quiet about the birth of Jesus, their divinity of choice. For the first four or five centuries, they were a persecuted minority in the Roman empire. They gathered together only in secret places. Celebrating in public anything having to do with their religion would result in quick retribution. And the punishment would be most severe in the case of Christmas, the birth of their divinity. Having become used to the secretive celebrations of Jesus’s birth, they have kept their habits unchanged even after the wholesale recognition of Christianity in the so-called West. Unwilling to acknowledge its precarious past, the Christian church has maintained that Christmas is to be celebrated within family circles. Public festivities of any description have thus been shunned for more than an entire millennium. Alas, the paradox of desolation explained at long last! Whether or not my hypothesis is correct, I feel rather happy with it. After all, what other rôle should a hypothesis have than to make its author happy? Come to think of it, most of my theorizing might well have the same hedonistic origin. Which is why I am one of the happiest elders ever. Alleluia!