Welcome to The Holidays ™ 2017, a time of year when things are destined to go badly, and maybe even catastrophically so, in a year when things have already gone badly, maybe even catastrophically so. It’s been a year of shredded dignity, metaphorical slaps to the face, general disillusionment about the world we thought we lived in, and some good ol’ run-of-the-mill human evil, soooo —
Let’s bring it all to a head by surrounding ourselves with fatty foods, last-minute shopping surges fighting the slow encroaching crush of humanity at your local consumer shrines, relatives you only see once a year for damn good reasons that you somehow forget about in the intervening year, and top it off with some crippling debt!
During this 3- to 14-day span, yule definitely make some decisions you regret, including but not limited to:
Ingesting three times your usual daily caloric intake (bonus points if you get it done in one sitting), and then reaching for another piece of pie anyway!
Rushing out “for just a minute” to the store to get that one last gift you forgot, or that ingredient you were sure you had in the pantry, only to get caught in traffic for half an hour. When you get to the store, it goes without saying that they won’t have the thing you need, which — after a brief fit of catatonic rage — will have you either repeating the process or going home in a right proper tizzy, ready to snap at loved ones who only wanted to bake you a pie.
Getting dragged into a “discussion” with that one family member about the politics of the year. Politics are always toxic talk at family gatherings, and doubly so this year. If you must get involved, try to do so during a course where nobody has a knife.
Hearing somebody say “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas” and doing or saying anything other than a reciprocation or a thank you.
Putting a purchase on the emergency credit card — no, not that one, the OTHER emergency card, the one for real bona fide emergencies — because you’re not sure how much money you have left and the first emergency card might already be maxed out, you’re not sure, let’s just be safe.
Anything involving fruit cake.
Somehow failing to deliver on even the tiniest of promises to yourself vis-a-vis exercise, hobbies, or the nebulous idea of “me-time” despite days where your actual obligations are so few and far between, you could sail barges in between them sideways.
Reaching for another piece of pie because everything’s in the ditch already, why not splash around in the mud a bit?
And more —
And, finally, don’t forget to wash it all down with a huge helping of guilt and bad juju when you come to your senses and realize what an absolute jackass you’ve been. You’re going to feel like hell by the end of it, so why not enjoy the ride?
Remember:
Christmas comes but once a year, but the mistakes you make now can last all year.
Even if it were under attack, there are few things in our society so likely to survive an attack as Christmas.
Still, you can’t swing a pixelated cat this season without running into something like this:
Which, holy crap, is awesome. But frightening. But mostly hilarious and awesome.
The opening salvos in the perennial “war on Christmas” sounded a few weeks ago, when Starbucks had the gall to roll out a “holiday” cup design that had a little less vaguely Christmas-themed adornment than in years past. The valiant defenders of Christendom and Christmas quickly recognized the slight and wasted no time returning fire upon the hapless soldiers on the front line: the poor and uninterested baristas who put the cups into their hands. Which is a little like if I, upset over all the prematurely wilted spinach I’ve gotten lately from my Kroger, go in and dump a bin full of rotten greens on a bagboy. In classic smug (and most importantly, easily bandwagon-able) fashion, throngs of Christmas crusaders took back the coffee bar by claiming their names were “Merry Christmas”, thus forcing the disinterested twenty-somethings to make the totally-not-Christmasy-at-all red cups absolutely Christmasy.
(Fixed, apparently.)
Still, blink and you might have missed it. Already nobody cares about the cups anymore, much like nobody cares about the religious lunatics who felt slighted by the cups. There is, after all, actual persecution and marginalization happening in the world without entitled yuppies inventing more of it.
But we know what’s coming.
Because Thanksgiving is almost here. And Thanksgiving, for all that most of us look forward to guzzling gravy straight from the boat and possibly embedding our heads inside the cooked turkey’s flavor-cavity (what, am I the only one that starts Thanksgiving dinner that way?), is nothing these days but the red carpet leading up to Christmas’s door. The decorations are going up. The soundtrack at the mall is changing from inane pop music that nobody listens to to the heartwarming Christmas songs none of us listen to. (The previous sentence is correct.) (And seriously, give me Elvis Presley and Burl Ives and keep the rest of the holiday tunes.)
Fox News will cry persecution first. Actually, they probably already have. Then, under pressure from … people, apparently, or maybe just because they see Fox doing it so they feel they should jump in, CNN will “investigate”. Then it’s only a matter of time before the local reporters in your city are standing in front of a nativity scene in your neighborhood, as stony-faced as if they were standing witness at a murder scene, to tell you about the protests outside such and such government building and the pushback from whatever organized blah-blahs. (I seriously got weary in the middle of typing that sentence and just gave up.)
Let’s be honest. Christmas is not under attack. And even if it were, the “attack” means about as much as an army of clowns attacking Fort Knox with toothpicks. Christmas is woven into the thread of our collective national consciousness. Atheists and Jews celebrate Christmas: it’s a good way to feel involved, and it’s too exhausting not to. Christmas is going nowhere. It’s too much a part of who we are.
But neither are the eternally put-upon going anywhere, which means that every year we will have to put up with the rhetoric (and let’s be honest, the whining) of those who feel that the rest of the world is at war with Christmas. And, internet society being what it is, mockers of those who complain about the world being at war with them live for this season too. The War on the War on Christmas is as predictable as December 25th itself.
It’s endlessly amusing to me that in this season which is supposed to be about lifting each other up and expressing warm feelings and charity and giving and vaguely-defined general good will that throngs of idiots will take to the internet and the street and whatever soapbox is to hand to get good and wound up about this invented conflict.
Which is why, this season, we need to declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. All of these people need to go. People are allowed to say “Merry Christmas”. People are allowed to not say it. Government buildings should maybe not decorate themselves in explicit Christian iconography because, you know, that irritating little Constitutional bit about the separation of church and state. But that doesn’t stop you from decorating your house, or from going out and seeing other houses decorated, or from going to the mall and wading around in the Santa Claus orgy that’s been going on there for weeks. Fargoing live and let live.
But of course, that also means that we need to stop giving attention to the squawkers who ridicule the idiots getting upset about this stuff in the first place. Live and let live. Just like anything else on TV and in the news: if you don’t watch it and don’t care about it, pretty soon, they’ll stop running it.
So declare war on the War on the War on Christmas. Ignore all the hate-babble and go and have yourself a merry little whatever.
Just make sure you spend lots of money.
That’s the real reason for the season.
That, and Rambo Jesus. Sorry. I just had to post it again.
This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.
I don’t often start my posts with a title, but today I did, and I immediately realized that it’s a misleading title. This is not a post about that guy who’s a creep around the holidays. You know him. He starts wearing the mistletoe hat around, oh, say mid-November and talks a little bit too loudly about the gifts he got for all the women at the holiday party.
As a sidebar, for the love of sandwiches, why do we still have to call this time of year “The Holidays?” Yes, I understand: multiple religions, multiple celebrations, the PC-fun-police basically have to wear diapers to keep from sharknadoing themselves to avoid stepping on anybody’s toes during this sacred time. Yeah, “sacred.” First of all, Christmas is king, anything else is an also-ran (and I’m not saying that as an ardent christian or anything, but look around. Christmas won. Game over). Second, and I’m seriously asking this because I have a hard time believing it–has anybody actually had their sensibilities damaged or their feelings hurt because a stranger in a store wished him a “merry Christmas?” I deplore calling this time of year “the Holidays”, because it feels like hiding under an awning to avoid getting rained on when a tiny wisp of cloud appears in the sky. It’s reactionary in the extreme. For my money, just go around wishing people a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hannukah or a Fantastic Festivus and let them sort it out.
And further sidebar, I know this is the time of year when the religious wingnuts and Fox News especially will start kvelling about the “war on Christmas”. If you’re in that crowd, and you believe a) that there’s a war on Christmas in any way, shape, or form OR b) that if there were a war on Christmas, that Christmas would be in any way diminished by some city hall getting rid of their nativity scene, you’re delusional. Christmas is the Juggernaut and from late October through all of December it goes plowing through the walls of every building in town. Because Christmas isn’t really Christmas anymore, not really. It’s a religious holiday originally, but now it’s a ritual in the only religion that matters in this country: capitalism. ‘Tis the season to run up some credit card debt and stimulate the economy. Just sayin’. I for one can’t wait for all the news reports on how well or how poorly the businesses have done this Black Friday.
Which brings me, circuitously, to the point. I heard a news story earlier this week about a guy who has been camped out at his local Best Buy for a week already in anticipation of the Black Friday deals, but you don’t have to look far to find other examples. It’s epidemic. Somehow, “camping out” in front of a store for hours or even days before it opens has become–not just acceptable (and that’s enough of a Bizarro World scenario to begin with)–but expected if you want to get the best deals, the most ridiculous savings. The guy in question has made a sign where he proudly proclaims his actions, and even invites passersby to take pictures. Presumably, he’s having “fun.”
Apparently this is some new definition of the word “fun” I was previously unaware of.
Far be it from me to decry what another person does for “fun.” But I really have to wonder about the state of your life if you engage in this particular pursuit of happiness. I mean, a simple cost/benefit analysis will tell you that no bargain you could snag by camping out is worth cashing in a vacation day for. Say you make $20 an hour and you want to buy a TV that’s $200 instead of $500. And you camp out for a day. Well, that’s a day of work lost to the tune of almost $200. Plus you have to supply your tent and feed yourself. This guy apparently has pizza delivered, so I’m going to be generous and say that your “camping” consumables are going to run you around $30. So, yeah, okay, you’ve really saved a net of almost $100, but then you also had to sleep outside in the cold. And if you camp out for multiple days, the math only gets worse. So don’t kid yourself about the insane “savings” you get.
Also, as anybody who has gone shopping on Black Friday without camping out knows, stores have limited quantities of their best deals, which means that if you’re not in the first wave of screaming charging mouthbreathers through the front door, you aren’t getting that Playstation 7 for only $300. You’ll arrive in the electronics section to find the empty shelving ripped from the drywall and return to pay full price a week later.
So what’s my point? My point is this. This is not the behavior of a healthy society. Camping out for deals, trampling store employees making minimum wage, breaking into fistfights over awful toys for your children… these are not the actions of well-adjusted individuals, yet they happen every year, and we are not surprised anymore. Think about that. Last year, my wife told me that there was a shooting at some store on Black Friday morning, and I almost yawned while asking, “just one?” And it gets worse every year. The arms race is neverending. Macy’s opens their doors at 7pm on Thanksgiving night, so Sears one-ups them and opens at 6:30. I’ve been seeing ads all week for pre-Thanksgiving “doorbuster” sales, all of which are appended with the admonition to “watch for our Black Friday ads!” So I’m supposed to go shop now, and then go back and shop again on the Superbowl of Shopping.
No.
On Black Friday, I will be safely and cozily snuggled in my bed, dreaming of penguins and safe in the knowledge that I am not part of the evil machine that twists the minds of otherwise rational people during “The Holidays”. In the meantime, I will ignore every ad for Black Friday sales, I will sneer every time I hear the word “doorbuster”, and I will laugh derisively at every picture, news story, or anecdote of some idiot camping outside of any retailer to be the first in line for the savings. Yes, I will pay a little more for my Christmas presents. But I will feel rich in the knowledge that I am not a part of this epidemic.
Because make no mistake. If you go out and shop on Black Friday, or–leftovers help you, Thanksgiving Day– then you are a part of the problem. Even if you just go to “see what the deals are”, you are encouraging these retail vampires to continue their lunatic behavior, to keep pushing the shopping season back earlier in the year. You are endorsing the behavior of the idiots who are out there in tents right now sipping horrible coffee and laughing and pretending they’re having fun. They’re not. And if you think you’re having fun camping outside a store to save money on a TV, you need to take a good hard look inward.
Take a stand. Fight the power. Enjoy your tryptophan coma and sleep in on Black Friday.
Everybody knows the best deals are on Cyber Monday, anyway, and you don’t even have to put on pants to get those.
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