Way back in 2005, I asked my dad to write an essay about the holidays for this site. I thought I’d re-post it now, because we are all feeling the cheer and madness so typical of this season.

(And because I imagine I’m not the only one who misses him and his take on life).

My essay on the holidays, by Fred Rotondaro

Many of us look to the holidays with intermingled feelings of joy and dread.

I am one of those.

The holidays are life in miniature.

They are passion and boredom, rote activity and opportunities to show love and maybe a little disdain, life and death.

The holidays overwhelm us and they depress us. We eat and drink too much, sleep too little.

I have vivid recolections of my early Christmas holidays.

My father in his favorite chair being as gracious as he could be to our hordes of relatives, and me sayiing "don't worry, Pop, they'll all be gone in a few hours. You can make it."

And my mother always winding up in a hospital because she ate all the wrong things causing her heart fluids to go up, whatever that means.

And my uncle Fred, the soft spoken Marine combat veteran, with his namesake, me, in tow visiting our relatives on Christmas Eve to discuss/argue politics and society and religion.

The holidays, for me that means Christmas, for others a wonderful variety of other meanings, are indeed life. And like life, they offer the chance for renewal-a renewal that can be grounded in faith in God, belief in the goodness of man, or anything that inspires us to reach beyond our reach.

It is time to end this little essay I am, after all, busy...shopping to satisfy the deamds of our secular Christmas, finding quiet time to think and pray to satisfy my religious Christmas.

And remembering always to draw distinctions because as P.G. Wodehouse wrote, "Christmas is once again at our throat."