Have a Merry Winter Festival

Merry Christmas . . . Happy Holidays . . . It's that time of year again. Or is it? Have a very merry Winter Festival. There, that's better. After all, it is that time in our history, isn't it? The signs are everywhere--most especially in the schools. So perhaps it's also time for a minor calendar alteration. Nothing major here. Just a slight readjustment to reflect modern sensibilities and preoccupations. And if it solves a few other problems along the way, so much the better.

Recently our college was in the throes of its annual debate over the academic calendar. The problem is the same one we face every year: how to squeeze a legitimate fall semester into, well, into the fall. As things stand now, it simply can't be done. Hence we do what any number of schools do. We start sometime just after the middle of August so that we can finish sometime just before (shhh) Christmas.

August?!?! Who in the name of Horace Mann wants to be sitting in a classroom when beaches, not to mention summer jobs, still beckon? Football players may have to report to campus in August, but students shouldn't be (and usually aren't) among them.

Thanks to the ongoing secularization of what was once undeniably the Christmas season, a solution is finally at hand. What with Christmas giving way to something called a Winter Festival, why not give history and the calendar a little push? Besides, what's so sacred about the timing of a Winter Festival anyway?

So let's just move the whole thing back a few weeks. The more you think about, the more problems this will solve. School calendars are just the beginning. But they are a beginning. Fall semester could then begin, amazingly enough, in the fall. And fall, after all, is the time when thoughts of classrooms and courses creep somewhere unto the radar screens of students, as well as those football-obsessed individuals who try to pass for students. The semester could then proceed essentially uninterrupted into the early part of January. And so could the football season.

THEN let the Winter Festival begin. And let it coincide with football playoffs, both college and professional. College presidents currently oppose a playoff system for football because of all the precious class time that players and student-fans would have to miss. This presidential claim is spurious at best, but let's grant them this point.

All the more reason to shut the colleges (maybe the entire country!) down for two or three weeks in the middle of January. With Christmas a forgotten memory and a Winter Festival in full swing, there will be no class time to be missed. Besides, what better reason could there be for a festival in the first place!? With the entire country essentially on hold (save for shopping), there'd be plenty of time for both college and professional playoffs to proceed daily--and simultaneously.

Admittedly, at this not-quite-yet-post-Christian point in our national evolution the entire population is not yet completely football-obsessed or Christ-oblivious. But we're getting there. So why not just hurry the process along? Besides, there's something in this proposal for nearly everyone.

In the first place, we northerners don't need a Winter Festival in December. At that early point in the seasonal shift, winter has just begun. Better that we get our festival when real winter is upon us and the winter doldrums have hit with full force. February would probably be ideal, but January will have to do. It's certainly an improvement over December. Besides, as calendar matters stand now, December 25 (or that date which is well on its way to anonymity) is much too close to Thanksgiving. Having just come together for all of three or four days, families need a longer stretch of time before they're ready for the next round of (even longer) togetherness. Once again, February might be the better option, but January will simply have to do.

When it comes to what matters most, January must be designated Winter Festival Month. And what might that matter be? Why football, of course. On this score, there's something in this proposal for doldrum-free, but football-obsessed southerners. If any section of the country has evolved further on the football/fanatic scale, it has to be the South. So why not speed up this evolutionary process generally? Why not hasten our advance (?) from Christianity to paganism as well? And what better vehicle could there be for this journey than football?

It's understood that this might well create a crisis of sorts in the South where at this historical moment commitments to Christianity and football run equally strong. If forced to choose, which will win out? To borrow from Jack Benny when a robber informed him it was his money or his life, "I'm thinking, I'm thinking . . . "

And while everyone is thinking, try singing the following to a more upbeat version of "Silent Night":

Raucous day, raucous night
All is wild, we're in the fight
Oblong object, we worship you
And our colors, whatever the hue
Cheer in earthly bliss,
Cheer in earthly bliss.