Merry Schema!

The culturally recognized chunk of
perceptual experience known as: The
Jello dessert at a Xmas party.

Usually my blog posts are about stories related to my work. But for Christmas, I decided to deviate just a bit…mostly because I hate Christmas. I mean, I don't hate the fact that I get to hang out with my family and celebrate the birth of Christ, but why does that have to coincide with the most tacky, annoying, over-commercialized time of year? I guess because Western society made it so.

Sometimes I just hate Western society. And that's one reason why I loved my Cultural Anthropology class last semester. It reminded me that our little North American bubble is tiny. There are millions and billions of people out there who do not live the way we do. Their still are cultures out there that do not celebrate greed and materialism. Plus, in class I learned that Christmas is a schema! That is, in my opinion, the perfect way of looking at it. From my textbook: "Schemas are patterned, repetitive experiences. People living in North America cannot avoid a schema called Christmas, a chunk of experience that recurs once every year. The Christmas schema can include features such as snowy weather and activities such as baking cookies. It involves public events in secular spaces such as the annual rush to complete holiday shopping in the last days before Christmas." How perfect a definition is that?

And how perfect would it be if we turfed the schema we experience every year and replaced it with something entirely different. I don't know, maybe we pick a date in the Spring, and instead of giving gifts to our family members we bought and gave things to the homeless. Maybe we invited an immigrant family over for dinner, or even our neighbours! And screw the turkey dinner, make it BBQ and beer. I'm just a Scrooge I guess, but in the Spirit of the Season: Merry Schema!!