For some reason, my family thought that it would be a great idea to go to vivocity for lunch today, even though i was completely starving and vivo was nearly an hour's drive away. my father kept on insisting "we should go to a shopping centre to feel the christmas spirit!", and i simply had no energy to remind him that thompson plaza was a 5 min walk and junction 8 was a 5 min drive, so i played along. when we got there, as usual, vivo just looked like a bigger version of junction 8, but what i found more disturbing was the "christmas spirit" that my father was talking about.
what did i see there? confetti snow, plastic santa clauses, foil snowflakes just to name a few. tacky imitations of the originals, but you cant blame them for trying. what really caught my attention was all the christmas sales going on. i have seen them going on since even mid-late october, and now in november things are really picking up. all the retail franchises cashing in on the innocent traditions of giving and caring which christmas stand for... at least i believe thats what christmas used to be about. now it seems it's just another generic holiday to get rid of old stock and attract new customers. "yuletide cheer, 20% off!", they seem to coax me, as the sirens did to passing sailors. "christmas spirit,at half-price! come get yours now!" what will christmas become in the future, if it has degraded so much by this present day? 50 years down the road, will our children and grandchildren remember what christmas is about? will they still adhere to the values of charity and compassion, or will they treat christmas as just another excuse to get some money from their folks? will they even remember that it is christmas, and not "generic holiday" day?
and that was the "christmas spirit" that my father was talking about. sadly, it seems like it's more of a "christmas phantom" than any spirit, a shadow of what it once was.
I think i've posted Palms Read before, but here's an 8-bit version of the song i just found. that's right, 8-bit as in the kind of beeps and clicks that used to pass as music during the era of gameboys (the kind of stuff that used to be a part of every kid's life, but which people now download and play on their phones as a lame time-killer egs. pokemon red/blue/yellow). the song definitely has a less hardcore sound now that electric guitars and drums have been replaced with sounds that sound like they came from mario, but the essence is still there, and the awesome tempo shifts are still right on cue.
