To Xmas or Not

I've been a bit conflicted since my last post where I basically shrugged off Christmas. Apparently there's a part of me that doesn't entirely want to let it go. At first I worried that I was just being influenced by the corporate Christmas machine, but as I almost reveled in my disgust for all of the ads and sales and promotions encouraging people to go deeper into debt just to buy more presents, I decided that wasn't it. Then I thought maybe I was just being swept along by the general population's notion that Christmas just IS and if you don't go along, something is wrong with you. But then I remembered that I loathe 99% of the general population and the last thing I'm going to do is go along with them. So I was left with it being some spark of Christmas spirit left inside me, which I took as a good thing.

That spark has grown a bit defiant as I've noodled this idea over the last few days. It wants to reclaim Christmas for myself and my family as I see it, not as the rest of the world sees it. It's got a bit of a "fuck-you" attitude to it, saying that we're going to make Christmas whatever the hell we want it to be. After all, that's how it all started, when the Catholics decided to combine a bunch of other religions' holidays to help their followers coalesce in the Dark Ages. To me, it's a fluid concept.

The problem is that to a large extent, my enjoyment of Christmas has always been about the "season"--I enjoy the long stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, not particularly the day itself. And enjoying that time depends largely on what's going on around me. It has to do with a general sense of being in the season, of having brief experiences that reconnect with something familiar from the past, or something cool I've seen in a movie (like walking in Central Park in the snow). And as the season itself becomes more and more annoying and crass, it's harder to enjoy that. Not to mention that working in a retail company where everyone loses their shit for the entire month of December and every little thing becomes a crisis, well, that takes some of the fun out of it. So basically, everyone else is ruining it for me.

My internal notion of Christmas has always been largely influenced by movies and TV (like everything else in my life). There are vignettes of other places and times that patch together to form the image and thought of what Christmas SHOULD be in my mind, none of which will ever be my reality. Thanks a lot Hollywood. But those things do help reconnect me to a feeling of familiarity, a sense that it IS Christmas, so I do my best every year to watch what I can.

I'm sad to know that tonight will be the last ER Christmas episode ever. For 15 years, ER has been my favorite alternate reality. I started watching it from the start, in 1994, when it seemed very possible that could be my life (still hadn't failed to get into med school then). An exciting career, a cool city, ER offered all that to my imagination. And the Christmas episodes almost always create that perfect, snow-covered, trapped-inside-so-we-better-make-the-best-of-it atmosphere along with some moving story that would make me cry like a girl. When the snow stops falling on County General each year, I'm always a bit disappointed--fictional Chicago in the winter is one of my favorite places.

Happy Fucking Festivus

I'm so over Christmas already this year. Actually, I never got UNDER it, I just can't do it this time around. Despite the positivity and happiness I have experienced thanks to Barack's win, everything else in the world just blows goats. I'm sick and tired of being reminded of how shitty the economy is on a daily basis. I'm already on my last nerve with the people at work who insist about panicking about every little tiny problem that comes up, and who cling to the pointless hope that people are suddenly going to decide they need to buy more useless shiny crap from us when they can't make their mortgage payments. Business is going to suck, we know that, get over it and move on!

And frankly, reading about the mouthbreathing scumbags who trampled that poor man to death in a Wal-Mart and then KEPT FUCKING SHOPPING pushed me over the edge. If that's what people have made Christmas about, wanting a bargain so bad they're willing to kill somebody, then I'm done. Game over. F Christmas.



I said jokingly a few years ago that I was going to just start celebrating Festivus from now on. I even made a Festivus pole, which was not only cleaner than a tree but much more practical with four cats. But now I'm serious. I'm done clinging to a notion of Christmas that I find more and more elusive every year. Might as well just chuck it and start over.

The thing is, Christmas for me was always a somewhat squishy concept. Being a non-religious person and smart enough to understand that it was NEVER actually the birth of Christ, the religious aspect of it meant nothing to me. Although I must say, the STORY of it had an appeal as a kind of beautiful myth, and Mom instilled in me an appreciation for the ceremony and poignance of that aspect, even if it meant little personally to me.

Of course, presents played a big role when I was a kid. I do still remember the greatest Christmas gifts I got (the Millennium Falcon, the Lego Castle set), as well as the year I so dickishly shunned my dad's gift of a little woodworker's set (which he gave me because I had been his little helper remodeling the garage). But that's just stuff, and as the years have worn on, I only really enjoy giving gifts to my wife, and even that is often undermined by the reality of not being able to afford what I want to give. Too often, gift-giving becomes some obligatory exercise where you end up exchanging things with someone that they either don't need or could buy themselves. And I hate the obligatory nature of it to begin with.

So for the most part, Christmas was about certain traditions for me, things that reminded me of times when I felt comfortable and safe and at home. Some were traditional, like decorating our tree or learning to play carols on our piano, and others were non-traditional, like my brother and I watching Trading Places every year. Over the years as I moved around the country and experienced Christmas with palm trees, I clung to some of those traditions to maintain that connection. But I realize that you can't perpetuate traditions forever. You have to file them away as memories and appreciate them for what they WERE, but trying to recreate them every year is only going to prove disappointing. Just look at every Christmas comedy movie ever made, they're all about trying to create the "perfect" Christmas and failing.

Maybe when we have kids of our own, we'll reclaim Christmas to some extent, if they want to, as a fun time of year, but we'll be sure to teach them the truth about it (it's a pagan holiday that the Christians stole, Santa Claus is real until you're 10, and Jingle Bell Rock is the best Christmas song ever). They'll learn that you get gifts if somebody wants to give them, not because you're entitled. We'll sit by the fire and cuddle the dogs and watch A Christmas Story over and over and I'll tell them that once upon a time Christmas didn't involve trampling someone to death just to save 30% on a fucking TV.