Halloween is over.
The candy has disappeared from the grocery-store shelves. The Halloween pop-up stores have packed themselves into cardboard boxes and vanished for another year. America has moved on to the next commercial opportunity.
I’ve never been much of a Halloween celebrant. Maybe I’m just not comfortable messing with the spiritual unknown. You never know what you might accidentally invite into the neighborhood.
When I do dress up, I have a reliable fallback: Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn, the fastball-chucking relief pitcher from the baseball movie Major League, starring Charlie Sheen. The costume requires little more than a Cleveland Indians shirt and cap, horn-rimmed glasses, and an attitude problem. I can manage that.
Now Halloween is behind us, and we’ve arrived at the serious winter holidays.
First up: Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving has gradually become a second-tier holiday for me. That wasn’t always the case. Like many things, it changed when I left home for college.
My sophomore year, a classmate invited me to his house for Thanksgiving. In my junior year, I stayed on campus. Foreign students and those who lived too far away joined me in the peace and quiet of an almost empty campus. By senior year, I must have made it back to Laramie.
I don’t remember having a grand Thanksgiving epiphany during those college years. I discovered that Thanksgiving could happen without my family gathered around the table.
That may be one of the things that happens when you grow up. Holidays that once seemed permanently attached to home and familiar family traditions become movable. You leave home, and the holidays follow you, but they don’t necessarily look the same.
My most memorable Thanksgiving was attending the Rolling Stones in 2005. I worked the CU – Nebraska football game that used to be played the day after Thanksgiving when both teams played in the Big 12 Conference.
Then comes Black Friday, the annual commercial prelude to Christmas, when the country collectively decides that nothing says “peace on earth” quite like getting up before dawn to fight over a discounted Sony PlayStation.
I’ve never been much of a Black Friday shopper, either. At this point in my life, if I really need something, I’m better off buying it before Thanksgiving rather than standing in line at 5 a.m. with people who have been waiting all night for a 70-inch screen. I went to Radio Shack. When they went out of business, I didn’t go out on Black Friday.
But this year, I’m approaching Black Friday differently, as I did a few years back at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.
On Black Friday, I’m releasing Not Exactly Holy, a devotional for the not-so-religious.
It seemed appropriate.
After all, the holiday season has always mixed the sacred and the commercial, the meaningful and the ridiculous. Thanksgiving asks us to pause and be grateful. Black Friday tells us to buy something. Christmas brings a little of both.
In the middle of all that, there’s room for a devotional written for people who aren’t entirely sure what they believe, or who don’t fit neatly into any usual religious boxes.
That’s why I wrote Not Exactly Holy.
Consider it my small contribution to the holiday season.
No assembly required. No early-morning shopping. As far as I know, no spiritual consequences.
