I love this time of year. This holiday season. It makes me feel warm and comfy to know that I’m part of something larger than myself. I am a Consumer.
And it is a holiday season, not just a succession of holidays dominated by one big noisy day appropriated by Christians from the Romans and Celts and then appropriated again by the Merchants. Here in the US, at least, we’ve developed a whole set of rituals that tie the season together into one thematic whole.
It all begins with Turkey Day, which starts our Consumer juices flowing by celebrating Gluttony. The spirit of the day is appropriated from the Roman Saturnalia, but they didn’t have football or Underdog. Turkey Day is followed almost too quickly by Black Friday, when the Consumer rises from the couch to do ritual Battle for Bargains. Then there’s the exciting Countdown of Shopping Days, the frenzied Orgy of Paper Ripping and another Celebration of Gluttony, the somber and reflective Post-Xmas Week of Returns and Regrets, and finally the absolving New Year’s Eve ritual of Bingeing and Boasting when you forget the past and make outrageous promises that will haunt you all the next year.
It’s good to have traditions.
There’s a lesson in this holiday season for writers. Appropriate others’ good ideas. But appropriating is not the same as stealing. Appropriating will not trigger alarms when the product goes out the door. Appropriating means making it your own. You change it, repurpose it.
I recommend misreading. Sometimes the path to appropriation starts with not exactly understanding something that you read. I often see where I think an author is heading and set the book aside to follow what I take to be the author’s thread, only to discover when I take up the book again that where I went isn’t where the author was going at all. When that happens, I find myself with an unplanned child idea, misconceived, malformed, and yet my own. I love those motherless babies.
By now it should be clear that the title of this post is a verb. Feel free to appropriate anything you find useful here.