It’s December. And I hate December.
It’s hard to hate Christmas because lots of people make it hard on you. If you hate St. Patrick’s Day, people will nod and think about the annoying drunks. If you hate New Year’s, they’ll think about how they’ve also never been to a party with suits and ties and kissing at midnight.
But Christmas, Christmas is magical. There’s an obese gentleman who is bonkers with cheer. He has a wife he’s never had a public affair on. They purchased their own reindeer. There’s the birth of a key religious figure. There’s the ritual on top of the spiritual on top of the gifts on top of on top of on top of.
I get it. Christmas is very cool for a lot of people, and when they experience something very cool, they have a hard time understanding why you don’t feel the same way in your loins. Telling people you don’t like Christmas, I might as well say I’ve never understood the big deal about doing penis stuff with other people or with myself. It’ s like, “Are you even of the same composition, are the same basic human chemicals inside you?”
The way I’d say it now is like this. I had some good Christmases, and I had some bad ones. Overall, I liked getting stuff, and I fucking loved not being in school. But I only really remember two times I was excited for Santa, when there was a spirit or a holiday thing running through me. Out of 30 years, that’s not a ton.
The way I’d say it now, it’s like this. I think in order to love certain movies, you had to love them as a child. Or a teenager. If you see Labyrinth for the first time as an adult, trust me on this, it’s not the same. Your love for it might have some holdover effect, and that’s valid. But I can’t re-create that effect for myself. By the same token, I don’t subject others to my watchings of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
If you don’t get a dose of something at the right time, it doesn’t take. A vaccination has to come before the disease. It’s not a cure. It can’t come after.
For me, the Christmas vaccination never came. I got sick of the holiday, and it feels like there’s no going back. Even staunch believers seem to feel that Christmas comes too early. They get grossed out by the retarded consumerism. They can look around and see that, motherfucker, some of this shit is just a little too much.
That’s how I feel all the time. So imagine all that without the redemptive factors. All I get out of this holiday, I go to Target to buy a mop and have to wait in line behind a thousand people buying a thousand things. The traffic on some streets in town is bananas. As in the kind of bananas that go on the road in Mario Kart and fuck things up big time.
And it kind of feels like, for lots of people, the world stops for about two weeks. They barely work. Emails go unanswered. My favorite web sites remain without updates. Social media is dead to me. I can’t even shame eat Wendy’s because it’s goddamn closed because we have two turkey meals out of the entire year, and they are less than a month apart. How dumb is that?
That’s the tip of the iceberg on why I hate Christmas. But is it possible for me to enjoy Christmas? Is there some way in which I can learn to love this holiday? If I really committed, could I find a glimmer of hope in Christmas?
Because let’s face it. This shit is going to happen the rest of my life. Every year. And it’s only getting longer. And I’m tired of facing the disappointment others have in my feelings. They’re not wrong to be disappointed, and I can change the world or I can change me. Right now, changing me seems more realistic, and honestly, I feel like changing the world at this point means purposefully removing a little of the magic from it. Not a great goal.
The best option, to me, is give it a shot. See what happens. If I try all the Christmas shit, then I guess I’ll know. I’ll be able to make a pretty strong goddamn argument against it, build a better hate machine.
But just know this: This isn’t my goal. I want to be happy. I don’t want to prove a point about hating Christmas. I want to come out and say, Hey, when you put in a little work, it’s kind of awesome.
So from now until Christmas, I’ll be posting every day, something I did to try and de-god-forsake this godforsaken holiday. Which seems pretty godforsaken in the literal sense. I mean, this god fella really let people fuck up his son.
Join me tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.