Last night I spent a considerable amount of time drawing and inking our Christmas card. I often half-watch television or videos when working on cartoons, once they have reached the "making the images look right" stage, as opposed to the "contemplating the blank paper and figuring out what to put there" stage.

I half-watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which as an adult is entertaining mostly for the camp value. The The Polar Express started up. I didn't really want to watch it, but the other choices were a Survivor finale and White Girls (we don't have cable), so I ended up with The Polar Express anyway.

It wasn't quite as bad as I feared -- yes, the motion-capture animation had that creepy puppets feel, and yes, the sense of wonder was excessively and annoyingly forced by the soundtrack. But it did have a few surreal moments, and for the most part its worst sin was being kind of dull. I say "for the most part," because it also had a thematic annoyance common to Christmas-themed entertainment: it was about the magic of believing in Santa Claus.

Terra's dilemma re: "spirit week" is one that I, too, struggled with. Wear a costume for Halloween? Or shun the abomination that is spirit week? I think I came down on the side of Halloween, eventually. I think I was a beatnik. It was an excuse to wear black.

Do schools still have spirit week? A quick googling suggests that they do, and that it is still a week of "spirit"-related activities culminating in something called "homecoming." Which, if you don't know it has anything to do with football and tiaras, sounds agreeably occult, like maybe it is the week when you summon all the spirits and they come home for a night and you have a party with them. And maybe that's how it started, hundreds of years ago -- it does correspond calendrically to Halloween/All Saint's Day/All Soul's Day.

But at my school the spirit they tried to summon was not a spirit of the beloved departed, nor spirits of the holy or ethereal or alcoholic variety. It was a kind of spirit called "school spirit," which seemed to have something to do with our selected champions (that is, football team) attempting to defeat the selected champions of another high school in a ritualized war game (that is, a football game). The spirit part was that we were supposed to be really excited that this was going to happen.

Yes, the other school was a state-regulated public high school just like ours, and the only reason we went to Kentwood and not Kent-Meridian or Kentridge was because of where our parents happened to live, and if we moved because Dad got a new job we were, at that point, supposed to conjure spirit in support of an entirely new school.

We're number one! Whoever we are!

School spirit was also not based on any tangible distinctions. It was never, We're number one! In reading scores! Or, We're number one! In otherwise smart girls who drop out to have babies because their best friend did the year before!

It wasn't even based on the actual performance of our champions -- we were supposed to conjure just as much of that nebulous "spirit" for a football team that always lost. Maybe more spirit. When you're in last place, cheer harder!

Spirit week always featured something called a "pep rally," usually on Friday. I find rallies of all kinds highly suspect exercises in propaganda and groupthink -- even if I support the cause, the methodology is disturbing. That's because the methodology of a rally is exactly the same no matter what it's for. Save the whales? Kill the infidels? Accept Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior? It doesn't matter. A rally is a rally. It uses both subtle and not-so-subtle group dynamic coercion techniques to turn skeptics into faithful, faithful into frenzied. What are the most famous rallies of all time? The Nuremburg Rallies, of course. Where the Nazis got themselves up into a killing frenzy.

At a pep rally, we were supposed to get ourselves up into a killing frenzy that didn't involve any actual killing. But it did involve lots of shouting and cheerleaders. The cheerleaders would exhort different age cohorts to shout together. "Sophmores!" "Now, Juniors!" "Louder!"

The act of shouting produces a visceral response -- if you say something out loud, a part of you starts to believe it. Except, what they had us saying was nonsense, maybe something like "Go! Bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S!" It was propaganda in service of itself. The thing we were supposed to believe in was the legitimacy of the whole concept of school spirit, pep rallies, football-team champions.

I hated the pep rally experience sooooo much that it took a good ten years after high school for me to be able to accept sporting events as merely "entertainment other people enjoy that I find a bit dull," instead of "evil fascist plot against all that is good in humanity."

The pep rally is, obviously, an exercise in artificial tribalism. What I still don't know is this -- were they originally invented to provide a safe outlet for tribal instincts that are presumed to run strong in teenagers anyway? Or were they invented to manipulate our tribal instincts so that we would better conform to the established social norms of the high school?

And, either way, did school officials ever notice the irony of their constant urging us to resist peer pressure when it came to drugs or sex, while at the same time they enforced attendance at rallies that were all about succumbing to peer pressure?