THE AXIAL HOLIDAYS

Deciding what sort of holiday greetings to send at this time of year has become as difficult as deciding what to serve guests at a holiday feast. You never know what they're allergic to.

Some you wish a Happy Chanukah, others a Merry Christmas or a Jolly Eid ul-Fitr or a Bountiful Quanza. And in an Age gone mad with political correctness, heaven help you if you get it wrong!

It's not hard to see why Frank Costanza (on "Seinfeld") should have created his own holiday: Festivus - for the rest of us. 

I've settled on celebrating only the most significant annual holidays, the ones that predate any and all of the celebrations we know today: the Four Great Axial Holidays (the Summer and Winter Solstices and the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes).

For, if there's anything more important than the sun and our position relative to it, I'd like to hear about it!

As long as the carbon-based units infesting this planet have been dancing around fires, it's been to commemorate (and even worship) the solar campfire that warms us all. Crops, animals, even rainfall depend on the emanations of the star we call Sol. And that seems  reason enough to raise a glass or two to it at least four times a year.

And since these significant moments are based on the fact that our planet is a bit cockeyed in its axial orientation, what better way to celebrate than with a bit of cockeyed fun?!

We've lost that wonderful Medieval tradition of turn-about, when the social order got turned on its head, when servant became master and master servant. Of course, there are cynics who'd say we've simply institutionalized that concept in our political systems by electing jackasses to rule us all year 'round.

In any case, as the old Romans used to say, "De gustibus, non disputandum est!"  Or "Don't bother arguing tastes, mate!" And how right those old Romans were!

Let's set aside the things that divide us - just for this one day - and gather around the bonfire once more and talk about the sun and how glad we are to see it rising again in the daytime sky. 

And let's hoist a few and tell a few jokes and have some fun at the expense of both rich and poor and try to imagine what happy circumstance has brought us all (as different as we seem) together in this moment.

And in the end, I think we'll come to see that the real lesson of Dickens' A Christmas Carol is not that Scrooge didn't celebrate Christmas but that he tried to avoid celebrating anything at all.

And let's collectively resolve that we won't make that same mistake.