I talked to my mother today. She's excited that I'm coming home on Monday and generally atwitter with the madness of December, flitting from one Christmas party, pageant, or parade to the next.

To say that she is a soccer mom would be offensive. She is more like a Mom of All Trades, juggling her volunteer work with my brothers' sports schedules and my sister's various band events and still managing to get the family together for a home-cooked meal more often than not. I'm eighteen years old, which means she's been getting her mom on for at least that long, which is why I was not at all surprised to hear her say she isn't yet excited about the wonder that is Christmas.

This is a woman who busts out the Halloween or Valentine's Day decorations a month in advance, so it is a rare event that she is not into a holiday. At Thanksgiving, she made edible pilgrim hat hors d'oeuvres out of marshmallows and shortbread cookies using a recipe she found in an arts and crafts magazine. Those were awesome.

I had mentioned that I wasn't really feeling all the reindeer decorations and grocery store remixes of "Do You Hear What I Hear," and she told me that the whole idea of Christmas shopping was sort of fatiguing. Once you fight the crowds to buy the gifts, then you have to wrap them, and (since the closest members of our extended family live at least two states away) rewrap them for mailing, which would be followed by a futile waste of a day at the post office, plus the requisite holiday baking, the writing of the annual family newsletter insert for the whack of Christmas cards - so obviously this holiday is an uphill battle.

Perhaps I come by my 'bah humbug' honestly this year. Or perhaps there is a bigger issue here. Before you assume this entry is about the commercialization of Christmas and go back to downloading music, take a deep breath. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the fact that Christmas is a commercialized mess. But if my Freshman Comp class taught me anything this semester, it was to ask the question, "Why?" How is it, then, that this holiday that is supposed to commemorate the birth of a baby in a stable one night two thousand years ago on the other side of the planet has turned into a nonstop barrage of advertisements, one day only sales, photo ops with a large fat man who enlists nine unsuspecting antlered deer to haul his ass around as he shimmies down the chimneys of the entire population of the world, more baking than most potheads do in a lifetime, parties of a variety such that you want to take your own life on the one end and live happily forever in the moment on the other, and that most trepidacious of all mind games: the gift exchange?

Granted, when December 25 was picked as the date for this most joyous of occasions, church officials wanted it to coincide with a preexisting pagan holiday commemorating the winter season. But it's still a far cry from, "Hell yes! It's snowing! Let's get a tree" to trampling a woman at Wal-Mart because you're in such a hurry to get a DVD player on sale. In the words of Barney Gumbel, "Jesus must be spinning in his grave."

Of course, that in itself is the answer. As cultures grow and change, so do their values and ideals. What may have been true of decades and centuries past is sometimes no longer the case. Ethan Watters, author of the book Urban Tribes, has been tracking the cultural shift that has redefined the concept of 'family' as a group of close friends. And God knows (no pun intended) that regular church attendance is less common among Americans than it was fifty or even ten years ago. The things that once defined Christmas have been redefined by those who celebrate the holiday. In short, Christmas is bigger than Jesus.

That's probably one of those things you go to hell for saying; so be it. I'm not saying the midnight candlelight service on Christmas Eve is meaningless. No one is questioning the validity of the Yule Log. I'm simply saying that the shopping, Santa, the food, the parties (both the craptacular and the funtastic) - all that is just as much a part of it.

Around this time of year, a lot of churches bust out the inspirational bumper stickers or display on their marquees the phrase, "Jesus is the reason for the season." Certainly they have an interest in preserving the religious aspects of the holiday, and I suppose it's true that there would be no Christmas without Jesus, but the thing has taken on a life of its own. It has become more than just remembering the Nativity and guzzling egg nog while hanging the stockings.

All these secular offshoots and attachments are a part of what keeps us alive, individually and as a society. They are important in both the long and short runs and each of us know that somewhere in our heads, but without Christmas to act as an implied reason or motivation, we might lose touch with some friends or wait for the 'perfect moment' to tell someone we love them.

Thus, I submit that Jesus is the excuse for the season. Sure, it's his birthday and everything, but to my best recollection none of the gospels feature party hosting tips or cookie recipes.

Go forth and celebrate, whether you feel like it or not. It never hurts to get out of the house and who knows how long it'll be before you have a good excuse to see your friends again. And as we take the 'intended purpose' of this divine day and run with it, God bless us, every one.

Someone got here by searching for: Chrismas with Oreos cookies And: bacardi razz and hot chocolate Reading: The grades from my final exams, which are slowly trickling in. Watching: 8 Mile, which was good, even though I'm not really about rap music. Listening to: Speed Graphic and Sunny 16, the Ben Folds EPs, which finally came yesterday. Rush shipping my ass. But the music is worth the wait. Eating: Pizza rolls, which are always a favorite.