Now that the Christmas season is secular, let's worship what we love: football

The Christmas season just ending brought with it all the usual debates and compromises and solutions. The official and often unofficial solution, here in the Third Millennium of what we now call the Common Era, has been to transform the Christian season into one senseless and seamless "Winter Festival."

In the light of what has been happening in schools and offices, in court houses and restaurants, let me offer a modest proposal. Let's do a little calendar tweaking and shove the whole thing back a few weeks. If it's only a winter festival that's at stake here, let's wait for winter -- real winter -- to take hold and save our reveling for January. The proposal may be modest, but it could solve a lot of problems.

For starters, I'm a college teacher -- make that a teacher at a public institution where winter festivals prevail and where Christmas is ignored. We forever wrestle with a problem: Fall semester never fits into the fall. In order to finish before -- dare it be said? -- Christmas, we have to start classes sometime around the middle of August. Who in the name of Horace Mann wants to be sitting in a classroom when beaches, not to mention summer jobs, still beckon?

Football players, otherwise known as student-athletes, may be compelled to appear on campus in August, but just plain students shouldn't have to be found grunting and sweating among them. Let them wait until sometime after Labor Day. Then let the semester proceed, unsqueezed and uninterrupted, right into early of January, Christmas be damned.

OK, there does need to be some sort of a mid-semester break. Why not Thanksgiving? That may be a bit late in the term, but we could move that holiday up a few weeks, since there is nothing sacred about the last Thursday of November. Besides, travel should be easier earlier in the month. More than that, Thanksgiving is something everyone can celebrate -- so long as we're careful not to make clear just who it is who is being thanked.

Since there's also nothing sacred, calendar-wise or otherwise, about a "winter festival," why not give the whole thing a little push in the other direction? The more you think about this, the more problems it solves, especially for this multi-cultural, post-Christian, football-obsessed culture of ours.

Ah, football. Let's cut to the chase here. If classes can continue into January, so could the football season, collegiate as well as professional. President Obama has indicated that he favors a playoff system for college football, bowl committees and college presidents be damned. After all, bowl backers are wedded to an outmoded Christmas season -- and to stockings stuffed with big bucks. That leaves academic leaders, who claim to be concerned about time away from the classroom for student-athletes and student-fans alike. Well, with a small schedule shift, everyone can be satisfied, save for those hidebound traditionalists who run those equally outmoded bowls. In any case, those bowl contracts can't last forever, can they?

Do you see where the logic is heading? Let's devote the entire month of January (and perhaps a small chunk of February) to a Winter Festival given over to what has become our national religion anyway. What with schools shut down, we could have that college playoff system without having to worry about such trivial matters as lost class time. And what with the entire country in a festive mood, we could run the professional and collegiate playoffs simultaneously. If we have Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football during the fall, why not have football every night of the week during WFM (whether that be Winter Festival Month or Winter Football Month)?

Football aside, there's something in this proposal for nearly everyone, especially Minnesotans. We don't need a winter festival when winter has barely begun. Better that such a festival occur when winter and those winter doldrums have combined to hit with full force. February would probably be ideal, but January will do. It's certainly an improvement over December. Moreover, as calendar matters stand now, Dec. 25 is much too close to Thanksgiving. Having just gathered around Grandmother's turkey, families need a longer stretch of time before another round of togetherness.

What truly matters to most Americans isn't family but football. Hence the inevitable logic of designating January as National Winter Festival Month. But one small problem remains: If any section of the country has advanced further along the football-fanatic scale, it's the American South, where commitments to Christianity appear to be equally strong. If people are forced to choose, which will win out? Will it be a Christian holiday season devoted to Advent, Christ's birth and revelation? Or will it be Florida and Alabama going head-to-head for a national football championship?

What a choice. It's remindful of Jack Benny face-to-face with a robber demanding his money or his life: "I'm thinking." And while such pondering is going on, try singing the following to a more up- tempo version of "Silent Night":

Raucous day, raucous night

All is wild, we're in the fight

Oblong object, we worship you

Whatever our colors, whatever our hue

Cheer in earthly bliss, cheer in earthly bliss.

John C. (Chuck) Chalberg teaches at Normandale Community College.

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