Sure cure for brain rot ... enjoy the events surrounding Christmas

If this weekend doesn’t get you in a festive mood, well … I just don’t know...

Firstly, a confession. Here we are two weeks from Christmas Day and I find myself getting so distracted by everything going on out there in the world that I have no control over – the commercialization of Christmas, politics, etc. – I’ve decided I need to back off from Facebook for a while. Spending too much time reading stuff on the internet is not unlike reading the back of a cereal box over breakfast – you sit there reading with glazed-over eyes like you’re not awake yet.

Furthermore, I realized lately I’ve been closer to Ebenezer Scrooge than to Bob Cratchit on the “Merry Christmas to bah-humbug” spectrum. It was a couple of weeks ago that I found myself grumbling about the incessant stream of Christmas songs coming over the store’s PA system while shopping to replace my worn-out computer.

“Hey, wait, slow down everybody,” my inner Ebenezer voice said. “It’s not Christmas yet. I mean, real life goes on. We still have to go to work and make a living and pay bills and take care of obligations.”

But slowly and surely, the nearer we get to the big day I’m veering closer and closer to Bob’s end, and thinking of things like La Pastorela and Mariachi Christmas overpowers me with warm and fuzzy thoughts.

A little hot buttered rum doesn’t hurt, either.

Just look around. Christmastime in Socorro is always a treat, what with a Matanza Saturday afternoon followed by the latest iteration of the big electric light parade on California Street after the sun goes down. It’s always a real hoot, with floats and Santa and, who knows, really long extension cords.

Not only that but - not unlike a scene from a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie - everybody will be converging for the Luminaria Stroll on the Plaza. Or is it farolitos?

The bag candle conundrum.

When I lived up in Santa Fe in the 1980s, if you said luminaria, people would give you a sideways look at you as if to say, “Huh? You mean farolito.”

I would then proceed to tell them I thought the terms were interchangeable, as one means little lantern and the other means light, but my words fell on deaf ears, for it appears there is a hard and fast rule on what those bag candles are called, depending on where you are living.

Turns out that the “luminaria” tradition may have originated in 1590 when explorer Gaspar Costaño de Sosa mentioned small bonfires they had to light to guide his scouting patrols back to camp. He wrote “luminarias” in his diary.

Over time, people thought that was a fun thing to do, and they would create small bonfires around Christmastime by stacking dry wood and piñon bark. Way before the invention of the paper bag.

Regardless, the luminarias all around Socorro’s Plaza are quite picturesque and a great photo-op, but try as I might, most of my night shots always came out all fuzzy looking.

I could’ve just as well dug out my old Kodak Instamatic. I think there’s an old cartridge still in it, although nowadays you can’t find anyone to process the film.

What the popular thing now, though, is to detach all those old, faded-out snapshots from your photo albums and scan them into your computer. And that’s okay because, with the right A.I. software, you can make them look (almost) new. But time marches on, and now people rely on their cell phones for capturing those precious moments and upload them to Facebook for people from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo to scroll past.

Speaking of photo-ops, the wetlands and environs of Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge are once again teeming with sandhill cranes, snow geese, hawks, eagles, blackbirds, ravens, and coots by the thousands. The Festival of the Cranes is in full swing and if you’ve attended in the past, you already know what a cool experience it can be and why birders and photogs flock to Socorro for a look-see every year.

I don’t know how that kind of organic entertainment stacks up alongside sitting in front of a TV or playing Candy Crush on a cell phone, but if you consider the “aaahhh” factor, people who get up early for the Fly-Out seem to take to it like a duck to water, pardon the idiom.

The perfect antidote for the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year 2024: brain rot. They define it as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of [online] material considered to be trivial or unchallenging … “

Hmm, I’m wondering if my columns pass muster. Maybe I’ll add longer words next time.