Christmas decorations should not appear at Halloween

"And I Know My Life Would Look All Right, If I Could See It On The Silver Screen."

I'm beginning to believe that nobody in this country knows how to live in the moment.

Maybe that's obvious. But Christmastime always makes me think of it because of the way people do Christmas music, and Christmas lights. People have their Christmas lights up before Thanksgiving—OK, up I understand, it can be cold and nasty here at the drop of a hat, so putting the lights up on a nice day in October is very reasonable.

But what I don't get is turning the damn things on. I mean, seriously. Just hang them up, and leave them there. Just because they're up doesn't mean they have to be turned on, right?

OK, let's be honest here. I don't even mind them being turned on really early, because I think they're so pretty, and I'm too much of a hedonist to turn down pretty when it's offered. OK? So, go ahead, turn them on, I won't complain. They're too pretty to complain about.

And on the oldies station they had an all-Christmas music weekend—the weekend of Thanksgiving. What is the rush? I will give them that they waited 'til after Thanksgiving—which was de rigueur in my mother's house—you weren't allowed to play Christmas music until after Thanksgiving. I remember that from when I got my Partridge Family Christmas album. I know I had the plastic off it, and it sat on the turntable, but did I play it? No!

But it really isn't the earliness that bothers me. It's the way it all ends Christmas day! My mother was telling me that the people next door turn on their lights the day after Thanksgiving, and take them down Christmas day. Christmas day! What's the deal? It's like it's the end of some kind of race, and having run it, it's over, we can forget it now. It's certainly not like it's a real holiday, where you might like to actually enjoy the moment, the day that is Christmas.

And has anybody ever heard of the Feast of the Epiphany? The Adoration of the Magi, when the Wise Men brought their gifts to the Christ child? Twelfth Night? How about the Twelve Days of Christmas? All those gifts, starting with the partridge in the pear tree, started arriving December twenty-sixth, because that's when the twelve days of Christmas are—December twenty-sixth to January sixth.

I know, hardly anybody knows this, and nobody really cares, and it's not really my point anyway.

It's the huge rush to have it over with that gets me. Radio stations that have nothing but Christmas music for the week preceding Christmas will stop playing it that afternoon. Hello—the day isn't over! What's the big rush? What's wrong with hearing Silent Night Christmas night, or ever the day after Christmas?

And it seems to me to be connected to the whole not-living-in-the-moment lifestyle that's running rampant in this country. Now, God knows I do this too. I have movies and TV shows on tape that I know I will never get around to watching—but I somehow feel I have experienced them just because I own them. Why? And now it seems that people are doing this with their whole lives. Everything has to be photographed, videotaped, recorded in some way . . . because our brains are going to be erased sometime in the near future, and we might need this record to remember who we are and what we've done.

I mean, yeah, I took pictures in NYC, and I wish with all my heart I had more. But I wouldn't give up having played in the surf for more pictures.

And now the pictures are being staged. Oh, I know it's always been that way for weddings, at least to a certain extent, but now they're taking pictures of "the happy couple" before the wedding. It's more practical . . . but it's not real. I know if I did that, I 'd look at those pictures and think of them as the pictures that were taken before my wedding. How can a fake picture capture a real memory?

"That's OK, I got it on tape!" But, what were you thinking while it was going on, what were you feeling? Whatever it was, you were one step removed from what was happening, you were behind a camera. You can look at it later, but you can never experience it again. Or maybe again is the wrong word.

I know I've been trying to hang onto pieces of my NY trip in a way that seems obsessive, but no matter what kind of pictures I might have, even if I'd taken a picture every second of the trip, I'd still be longing to go back. In fact, I'd probably be longing for it even more, since I wouldn't have experienced the trip, I'd have experienced a camera experiencing the trip.

It just seems terribly empty, this living life through a camera lens.


*James Dean, The Eagles