Word: holidayers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...usher in the Holiday's Cheer...
...holiday season will not be quite as joyful as usual in Vienna this year. For the first time in living memory, the voices of the city's world-renowned Choir Boys will not be heard in the Hofburg chapel this Christmas. Seven Masses, traditionally sung by the Sängerknaben, have been canceled; so has the State Opera's year-end performance of Puccini's Tosca. The reason: a 30-year-old federal law forbidding children under 14 to work for pay. The law was designed to prevent mine operators and the like from exploiting youngsters...
...trouble with the now pervasive clinical view of the holidays is that, along with offering undeserved comfort to unreconstructed Scrooges, it tends to confuse many perfectly healthy people about their own emotional condition. Even casual observation confirms that many weave through the holidays feeling vaguely like victims-acutely aware of the supposedly malignant pressures that the diagnosticians always talk about. No mystery here. With a consciousness razed by standard holiday pathology, even an intelligent adult may tend to construe the pressure as a symptom of something bad and imminent. In fact, that pressure is primarily only the moving power...
Admittedly, some of the pathological grist is not just humbug. The shrinks do gear up as though for combat duty during the holidays. Emotional turmoil is easily noticeable and evidently widespread. One pioneering study of Christmas neurosis, published by the University of Utah School of Medicine in the 1950s (and mined ever since by writers assigned to recycle the annual piece on "the holiday blues"), established that as many as nine out of ten people suffer "adverse emotional reactions to Christmas pressures...
...dreary litany seems endless. Even suicide is said to increase during the season, but this claim is disputed. No matter. Even if suicides decline, the rest of the diagnosis is enough to make the holiday seem like a prolonged calamity. Before Americans completely succumb to such an impression, now is the time to diagnose the diagnosis...