Every year when Thanksgiving articles begin to get posted, I start to get GERD. It means Christmas is coming. (Unless you’re Costco, and Labor Day means Christmas is coming.)
November is the harbinger for the worst time of the year, and a time when more than ever, you’re expected to not only enjoy it, but fully embrace it, or else be branded a supervillain.
I haven’t been able to get it up for Christmas since I outgrew my first set of figure skates. It’s not because something terrible or traumatic happened, it just began to wear on me. Let’s examine the reasons a person might not actually enjoy Christmas:
The season is too damned long. In Dickens’ era, people didn’t even unilaterally get Christmas Day off. If you got to church and had a good meal, that was a good Christmas. Now, radio stations immediately transition from Monster Mash to the Little Drummer Boy. It’s a slog that you’re grateful to see the back end of on Boxing Day. Anything that lasts longer than the World Cup better give you as much enjoyment as the actual World Cup.
It Has Turned into a Gauntlet of Social Obligation. We live in a world that, thanks to sociopath Ayn Rand fans in Silicon Valley, you can get anything you want, to your spec at any time… except one thing: You can’t get time to yourself or to just relax from about November the 1st to January 3. People who you haven’t seen in a calendar year all of a sudden (and often at the last minute, as if it’s their first time experiencing the Christmas season) want you to give up 4 hours on a Tuesday night so you can BYOB (really?) and they can feel good about hosting people for Christmas. There should be a rule that if you haven’t asked with a 10 day buffer for people to attend something at your home, you can sit at home and drink your own disgusting punch. Every company has a shitty holiday party (spouses often not invited, because we want to get festive on a budget) that takes up a prime Friday or worse a SATURDAY night whereby you get hammered to forget you work with such complete washouts. The food is often something dire like turkey, mash and cranberry in a martini glass, called a Turkeytini, and it reeks of thrift. Then there’s the aunts and cousins who come out of the woodwork and try to guilt you into standing around a shrimp ring while your uncle smokes a swisher sweet and talks about ISIS. Be honest: you don’t want to be any of these places, but you’re buying $50 tights and a few dresses and going!
The Food is Often Tragic. Christmas is the time for people to pull out their “family recipes” (read: a recipe card that came free with an oil change in 1953 that your grandmother started making because she needed to bring a dish to some shitty pot luck.) You think your family recipes make you Martha Stewart, but in reality, they more likely resemble the weirdest, most Mormon part of Pinterest. Then, there’s the ubiquite of the worst food idea man ever invented: The Pot Luck. Do not host pot lucks, please. Pot lucks transfer the work and expense that is the job of the host to the attendees. It’s a crappy yoke to hang around the neck of someone under the guise of an invitation. Let’s also really examine what a pot luck means: Your aunt Marie, with 16 cats who she lets walk their shit covered paws all over her kitchen counters and table is going to make some dish that requires a can of soup in it and it will be held outside of safe temperature for the hour and a half it takes to get to the party. And you’re going to eat it to be “polite.” Don’t host pot lucks. Ditto cookie swaps.
The Liquor is Bad and Most People Can’t Hold It. Quick: what’s the first lesson you learned the hard way about alcohol? Was it not to mix it with dairy or orange soda? Well, tough luck, because on Christmas, the punch has the cheapest vanilla ice cream money can buy, and Great Value orange soda, along with twelve other abhorrent ingredients. But hey, that’s only a problem if people drink too much on Christmas, right? That never happens. Christmas is a time marked by people putting the worst alcohol, Spiced Rum, inside the worst other beverage, Egg Nog. And that’s if you’re lucky. Generally, you’re stuck with undrinkable options that you drink reluctantly to forget where you are and pay for the next day, with sugar shits and sandy eyes. Add to this the fact there’s always one uncle who has a cranberry vodka smile and he’s going to tell you how it is, and you’ve got yourself another reason to hate liquid cheer.
The Music is an Aural Crime. There is nothing worse than being at a party with an audiophile who wants to show off his record collection… except the entire season of Christmas. Even if you take out the fact that there are thematic issues with a lot of songs (Baby, It’s Cold Outside, among others) the actual music is of poor quality and resembles something Diane Warren wouldn’t even put her name on. Add to this that no new Christmas songs have really been written since Bing Crosby only had one kid to thrash, and you get a ridiculous amount of repetition that begins to sound like some kind of DPRK megamix demanding you “get in the Christmas Spirit.”
The Movies/ TV Very Special Episodes Are Only Slightly Less Terrible Than the Music. TV Very Special Episodes are a necessary evil, but at least no one’s rewatching the season 2 of Scandal Christmas episode every year. But let’s get really real: Charlie Brown is a Christian lecture with weird dancing. Most of the TV specials from your childhood were good because you were so excited about getting stuff and eating chocolate, you’d watch the Stanford Prison Experiment if it was the only thing on TV. Christmas movies have got to be the worst of this group. Most of them are either poverty porn, or a story of how a woman is in charge of all the emotional and organizational labour responsible for making her family happy. That’s a reality for a lot of women, and it’s not actually very entertaining in red and green. Then there’s your movies about bad inlaws with hearts of gold, Santa being real, and other dire glurge. Also, anything that’s a “comedy” about Christmas is generally as funny as a Ziggy anthology. If the theme wasn’t Christmas, you would remove them from your Netflix queue with extreme prejudice.
Christmas is the epitome of white exclusionary nonsense. Despite the cries of “the war on Christmas,” Christmas is actually a weird time where white people push their definition of seasonal cheer on everyone else. Sure, you may have invited Samir to your Christmas party and he may have worn an ugly sweater, but the moment you make Samir feel weird by only talking about Christmas specials and traditions that white people engage in, Samir’s going to be looking for the door. White people also like to put out food like Rumaki and Samosas to pretend they are worldly. Samir is not impressed by this, and he definitely doesn’t want to have a discussion about samosas with you. Christmas is also a hostile environment to a lot of people, including people who lost relatives at Christmas, are lonely, or suffer from social anxiety or depression. They get dragged to events and told to have fun, or forced to get drunk by ‘well meaning’ people who don’t actually have much compassion for the situation.
The Clothes. Dear Lord, the CLOTHES.
HA HA UGLY CHRISTMAS SWEATERS! I can’t imagine another situation where wearing either something you bought at Goodwill ironically (or worse, paid 80 dollars to some shitlord from Brooklyn for) is considered “fun.” Uniforms generally are not considered “fun.” Reminding people of Bill Cosby at Christmas is probably also a really terrible idea if fun and DRINKING is on the menu. The alternative to the ugly Christmas sweater is a sweaty formal number usually referred to as “itchy church dress” in any other context. Congratulations. You’re now wearing that all night long while trying to lay off the vol au vents and Yellow Tail Shiraz. Your reward in a week will be a rocking yeast infection from wearing tights for so long.
Christmas Is No Longer About The Things Christmas Pretends To Be About. Christmas is supposed to be about stopping for a bit, spending time with people you love, and being grateful for what you have. Now it’s about maintaining a database of social obligations, going into debt to keep up appearances, and attending events with people who you’re not that wild about (and in some cases, doing it all while wearing spanx and trying to stay low carb.) It has gone well beyond a jolly old time. Exchanging lists in November and then receiving everything on those lists in December is transactional, not a caring act. It has become so transactional that we now have a for profit industry of dolls to make your child behave with the express purpose of you showering them with gifts.
There are a lot of things to hate about what we’ve allowed Christmas to become. It’s not a joyous time for many. What’s worse is that anyone who expresses anything less than cheer is automatically deemed a shitty person, despite their objections being rooted in compassionate reasons.
Being a Grinch is nothing to be ashamed of. Christmas isn’t legally binding. You do not have to assimilate or die. If Christmas gives you pause because you’re put off with our cultlike devotion to conspicuous consumption while kids go to school hungry, that’s a valid feeling. If you hate Christmas because your wife died on December 24th, you are still a good person. If you have an aversion to bad entertainment and food that looks like leftovers from the Texas State Fair entombed in Jell-O, you’re not alone.
Be a Grinch. Be proud.
