An incandescent bulb casts shadows, its light diffused by a lampshade, reflected off Christmas tree ornaments hanging off the conical shaped object we call the Christmas tree.

Shadows and diffused light.

Sadness and promises actualised.

The current calendar of the predominant culture in this area informs me today is Christmas.

At the North Pole today we have no sunshine.

At the South Pole we have plenty o’ sunshine.

On Mars this day is harder to comprehend, not being an essential part of a sol or a place in orbit around the Sun.

Without sunshine we have no crops — no grains, no vegetables, no fruit on the table. Nothing for animals to eat and us to eat them.

Life exists without sunshine but not without a solar system, as far as we know.

Earlier tonight, the remnants of the nuclear family — mother, son, daughter — sat on a church pew with son’s wife and daughter’s children to celebrate the birth of Jesus by listening to solo singers, brass ensemble, organist, choir, ministers, congregation and bell ringers, singing traditional Christmas music, and participating in the ritual that symbolises the Last Supper.

For the first time, without the paterfamilias.

On a damp, rainy day.

All of us in good health, with good clothes, good food, nice house, working motor vehicles and lacking for nothing important.

We suffer only the inability to form new memories with a living father.

Instead, we form new memories with the odd addition of electronic devices in our faces — mobile phones and tablet computers.

We are detached from each other, the fog of Internet connectivity clouding the old ways of communicating — playing card games, talking only amongst ourselves, the hum of television programs or radio/music machine in the background.

Can you believe that we used to allow the disruption of abacus practice and bookreading get in the way of a family get-together?!

The kids are too old for hide-n-seek or children’s board games. They don’t stay glued to the TV set watching cartoon shows.

All but my mother were well-trained, however, to sit here and use electromechanical audiovisual stimulation to rewire our brains.

I don’t miss my father as much as I did but his absence is present this Christmas season.

In his absence I don’t feel the need to extend love for every subculture out there, no reason to wish people “Happy Holidays!” to avoid accidentally making someone feel neglected because I didn’t specifically mention their [non]religious [sub]cultural ritualistic practices.

No apologies, no offense.

I can enjoy the habits of my childhood without feeling a need to defend my father’s imperfections to an imaginary set of critics looking to find a chink in my armour by comparing my personality traits to my father’s and saying, “Aha! We found a weakness in you that you knew came from your father but you didn’t overcome or correct.”

Yes, the ol’ internal critic raised its ugly head and I chopped it off tonight.

One less demonic voice in my thoughts that found faults in the tiniest behaviours.

Mourning and healing are emotional states for which I am grateful, able to distinguish myself from the cold, calculating combination of voltage states we call computing devices like this tablet PC.

There are other emotional states I want to face, including why I don’t want rock music or women leaders in the types of worship centres where I was raised — because both bring up sinful images for me, the sins of lust and gluttony.

So far, I have held up both the religious and secular meanings behind behaviours/traits because I write for a universe that contains mysteries explained and unknown.

A sin can lead to eternal damnation and to inefficient but effective social positioning.

By extension, what is guilt? Knowingly not aligned with expectations of your social peers, for instance?

It is 1:45 a.m. in the local time zone and I need to wake up at 6:30 a.m. for a long day of Christmas family activities so my delving into philosophical dissection of sin and guilt will wait until later.

It was a dark Christmas Eve without my father but we survived the ordeal and grew into different, perhaps even better, people in the process.

I want to devote some of my meditative mental activity on separating the subliminal threats, both physical and political, of the U.S. budget negotiations and determine how we unravel the domestic social fabric that has created an unsustainable network of government dependents and weave a new, flexible, sustainable web that’s compatible with the intricate operations of a global economy in transition from large-family based subsistence farming/ranching/shepherding to towering megapoli of decreasing populations dependently sucking up cheap rural resources nonstop.

What are the pitfalls and rewards from the 1000-year view?

What is the acceptable percentage of a global economy’s profit/harvest that we can dedicate to moving some of our eggs off this planet?

Let the 99-percent have their say in how they use their disposable income on infrastructure or playtoys.

Let the one-percent have their say in how they want life viewed from the top of the socioeconopolitical pyramid to look like 1000 years from now, as focused as they’ve been in playing the odds in the moment with a longterm winning view in mind (at the losing view of others in the one- and 99-percent, sometimes).

We win when our species leads the way for viable living options off this planet and out of this solar systems.

Otherwise, no ritual will make difference, no matter how much better we feel, healed and comforted by familiarity, for our descendants and their peers who inherit the handle that pumps the sustainable perpetuity of civilisation ultimately tied to our place in the natural environment of Earth, at least in the beginning…