Perspectives:
with The Chiang Mai Perspective embedded
Special Holiday Season 2003 Edition
(Late December, 2003; Hat Yai, Thailand)
by Jerry Waxman

BSD

The Holiday Season
Of Truth and Jerrytales

"It's all true, even if it didn't happen"
(One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest)

Recently a teacher came to me with a list of words to pronounce. Some had silent letters, some were stressed in odd syllables, and some had difficult diphthongs. No problem; that's my job, to advise the other teachers on usage of the English language. But then she added a word that I had not seen before; "eponymous." I could guess the pronunciation, but I didn't know the meaning.

I looked it up. Do you know what it means? The eponymous character in a story is the one who has the same name as you find in the title of the story. Can you believe that. They made a word that you'll never hear in everyday conversation; a word you'll never even see if you're not a literature scholar or an English teacher.

I felt sorry for the word. I looked for more ways to put it to use. It's like seeing an elevator operator in a two story building that has escalators. Sometimes you use the elevator just to give the operator a boost, to add significance to his life.

But how can you use "eponymous?" "You look eponymous today," doesn't work. "This eponymous weather," doesn't work either. Then it dawned on me [or maybe it dusked upon me]: How would it feel to BE eponymous? So for purposes of science and preservation of rare words, I have lent my name to the title of this edition. I am the 'Jerry' in 'Jerrytales,' allbeit this issue is not about me.

Here we are again at the end of December, the end of a year, looking towards great things, and it's the holiday season.

'Tis a season of laughter, good cheer, magic, charity, miracles and wonders, acts of kindness and decency. 'Tis the season to be jolly, right?

I wonder why 'tis that we have to relegate our moods to a season. What if we want to be jolly in the monsoon season, or in the dead middle of summer? What if we are cheerful and charitable all the time? Would we get arrested for being happy out of season?

You know what I do when the holiday season comes? I'll tell you...Sometimes, just to declare my independence and go against the grain, I force myself into a bad mood. Yeah, I work myself into a cynical, lousy mood just to spite the common wisdom of the season. Then I contemplate the notion that wisdom isn't very common at all, so the bad mood is for nothing.

I'm just kidding. I don't really take pains to get into a bad mood....A long time ago, I learned how to have a bad mood with practically no effort at all.

This holiday season is not a part of Thai tradition. There are no office parties, no extended vacations for most people, no rush to take trees out of the forest to put them in houses. So occasionally people ask me about all these "American" traditions. America is where all these holidays come from, right? So I've given some thought to the holiday season and what it could possibly stand for. Why do people suddenly behave differently than normal for this season?

Maybe with the end of the year approaching, people need to hurry to do all the things they had promised themselves twelve months earlier. They need to complete their year before the doors close, so to speak. Maybe people act and behave like decent, cheerful, and charitable folks not just to make up for the absence of these qualities the rest of the year. Maybe they need to give the year a happy ending, so that when they look back upon it, they see themselves as they wish they really were.

See, the traditions only call for being cheerful, and jolly, and caring, and helpful. They don't ever mention anything about being truthful or honest.....Truth and Honesty have low profiles during this season.. That's why in this season we hear so many stories of magic, and miracles, and ruthless people being kind to children and charitable to the needy; things we rarely witness in reality.

Well, this region may not be so familiar with the holiday season. But holiday season commercialism has not escaped the continent. Stores are all decorated in red and green. And the windows are frosted with snowflakes - which the people here never get to see otherwise.

So, 'twas the weekend before Christmas. I went to the local super shopping center to get some oranges. 'Twas all I needed, really. A MILLION PEOPLE WERE THERE....wandering aimlessly, grabbing double-decker shopping carts, pulling things off shelves as their children weaved around the knees of everyone else. Buying, buying, buying everything in sight, just as if they had always had this holiday and knew exactly what it was all about.

They had turned up the volume on the background music - familiar happy jingles about a snowman and a reindeer. Loudspeaker green light specials were going off all over the place: "Go over to the bakery, everybody. These sugar cookies are now on sale. Regularly 3 cents a piece, now get a special family pack of 60 cookies for only 78 dollars. But hurry! "

To get to the oranges was quite an ordeal. I had to take a detour over to hardware, back down to furnishings, up through ladies' underwear, and finally fresh vegetables. A big pyramid of oranges was sitting on a table. Just as I reached for some, a big wave of a thousand people swept me off to the bakery. Someone mechanically put two family packs in my hands. Each was nicely wrapped with a red ribbon, I might add.

I had to take another detour to get back to the oranges. Over to toys, back up to the fish, down through children's shoes, and up around the canned goods. I no longer had the cookies. Someone must've taken them from me. Now I had a packaged fish, all garnished with green herbs and red tomatoes and the biggest smile I've ever seen on a fish. It was wrapped with a nice red ribbon, too.

Well, I got some oranges. But 'twould be less than eponymous of me to say the rest was easy going. I went to the checkout stands and looked for the shortest line. All the cash registers were at full steam. At each was a line of people and their shopping carts piled and overflowing with clothes, food, DVD players, and children. Customers waited and inched forward, as their children played with the items in the carts. I handed the fish to one of the children as his mother spoke on a mobile phone. (I think she was speaking to someone in another line.)

A store employee wearing a red and white elf's hat directed me to the "fast lane." "You have less than 300 items. You have to go to the fast lane, sir." So I did.

The fast lane wrapped around the outside of the store three times. So I found my place and practiced patience. And as the seconds by-passed the minutes and turned into hours, I took the opportunity to muse - to think about the whole ordeal, and what the holiday season means, and what it means to complete a year as if we are completing some mission in life.

Is there something to gain from all of this? Is there some great Truth to glean from the holiday season madness? Is there some message in my story? Would I ever pose a question if I didn't have an answer?
Just now, I haven't worked out what it all means. But I think it might go back to the first question. "Why do we need to relegate jolliness and good cheer to a season?" All these virtues of charity and good will toward others naturally exist within us all year. We shouldn't need a holiday to pull them out.

Maybe if we practiced kindness and consideration all year, our holidays would be more meaningful. Maybe our years and our lives would be more complete. It would make it a lot easier to get a bag of oranges, that's for sure.

Well, I have to tell you; while I was standing and waiting in line, my mind pulled a Dickens on me. My mind left the moment to visit different holiday seasons of the past, present, and future. That whole episode is even more exciting and enlightening than the tale you just read. And you can have it today, for free, as usual. Just go to the box on the bottom and read the announcement.

Meanwhile, enjoy your holidays, folks. And while you complete one year in good standing with yourself and in a good mood, carry this into the next year. How much better off could we be if the whole year became the season to be jolly. That, at least, is one perspective, and it comes from Hat Yai.

Eponymously Yours,
Jerry

Have a happy, excellent, healthy and prosperous 2004

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