The Old Christmas with a New Whitewash

The smell of freshly baked apple pie with the crisscross crusty coating, the strawberry platter with hot sugar syrup, sizzling roasted turkey with thyme garnishing, this is what I used to see in Christmas.

I saw the snow falling as if all the loud and secret wishes from all households, alleys, lanes were coming true as they fell like dewdrops on the curvy gravel pathways. Every tree, porch, front garden waltzing in white lights. Where the snowman every yard used to whisper to the next of what the adults and the aged, the adolescents and the anew to the family were wishing, so that Santa could wink a mischievous wink and whip his sleigh to deliver a miracle out of his big red sack. And even though we got gifts and Santa got stockings, this is what I used to see in Christmas.

Now I’m smitten with soaring skyscrapers tinkling in tubed-tinsel lights. Yes its now the Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness over the simple. It’s the millennium of the Brobdingnagian monstrosity. The excessive, over-emphaseized, elaborate. No more is the small star on top of the medium fir Christmas tree in the cozy little cottage of the family of four, I want them to be as big as so the whole Manhattan can see from their own private windows behind the fire escape of their concrete apartments.

No more 50’s Christmas carols. Now its dubstep carol of the bells. A globalised, “world-is-flat” kind of Christmas where you can see the tall red conical cap that never stays straight up, on people wearing the Cheongsam or Kebaya. The tight-fitting red skirt and stockings, a hair band with colored neon lights framed as the shape of a snowflake. The cozy blanket stories from grandma about the origins of this day is now Disney on ice, the ever-so traditional square-packaged glossy gift with a fluffy red ribbon is now the Macy’s gift card. There’s no need to worry as long as this question never comes up: “Mom, what is a Jesus?”

And when global warming really screws things up, we always have that snow in a can!