In which Smoog pees on the leg of anyone carrying gift wrap
12.21.2005
Yes, it's that time of year again when I do my best to lock myself away in an airtight, hermetically sealed room and not emerge until January 3rd. It's the season where I become overwhelmed with the desire to nail every human being's head to a coffee table. It's the holiday I call the Bane of Smoog - or, if I'm feeling politically correct, Non-Denominational Statutory Bankruptcy Induction.
People tell me I'm a Scrooge because I don't buy a tree, I don't decorate, I don't send gifts, I don't attend holiday parties, and generally I behave as I would any other time of year. I am not a Scrooge. I'm also neither Christian nor Saturnalian, which renders the vast majority of holiday symbolism irrelevent to me. Except for the "hunting stags, tying some guy to a tree and sacrificing him for the good of the village" part.
What do you mean that's not part of the holidays? Do you know how long it took me to duct tape the Alien to a blue spruce?
Anyway, as I was saying, I'm not a Scrooge. I'm sane. Be honest - anyone who actually enjoys the Christmas holidays raise their hand.
Now everyone with their hand in the air go form a country somewhere remote and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
I don't care how much you profess otherwise - nobody really likes Christmas anymore, if they ever did in the first place. Supposedly the holidays are a time of rest and relaxation when we all make merry. I've yet to find someone who actually does just that. Instead, the entire population of the First World is hopping around like a bovine with mad cow disease careening from shop to shop buying gifts for people who really don't give a damn, staying up until 3 am cooking Christmas cookies and tarts and turkey and fruitcake, and fending off family members who are emotionally blackmailing them into playing Santa for the kids this year because "you have put on a bit of weight around the middle, dear. You'd be perfect."
What, pray tell, is so enjoyable about cramming yourself and 40 of your closest family members into a small room that would be designated a fire trap by any self-respecting city official, what with all those damned lights, tinsel, and tinder-dry evergreens? As if that weren't bad enough, you then throw into the mix jammed airports, alcohol, candied yams, a massive debt load, a half dozen or more young children who have consumed enough candy to equal a 5-pound bag of sugar, a basin of nog that is steadily breeding lethal bacteria on a minute-by-minute basis, and the religious equivalent to Muzak. I'm pretty sure Dante had that as the Fifth Level of Hell.
Every year as December rolls around my friends and co-workers start rubbing their hands together with eager glee. Every year, by the third week of December, those same friends and co-workers have the distinctive mark of Holiday Stress Syndrome upon their faces: dark circles under the eyes, spontaneous wrinkles, a facial tic, an inability to speak in complete sentences without mentioning "iPod", "Barbie", or "turkey", and the taut and frail skin tone of a dying consumptive patient. Finally, when January arrives, those same people are moaning and bitching about how much they ate, how much they hated the in-laws, how agonizing the flight home was, how much money they spent, and how they will never, ever do the same thing again next year. Until next year arrives. When they do it again.
The holiday season must have a similar effect upon the human psyche as massive alcoholic benders. You get dressed up, call a cab, go to a bar, end up surrounded by people who annoy the fuck out of you, start drinking to dull the pain, keep drinking, rip off your shirt, dance on the bar, make a fool of yourself, throw up, pass out, wake up the next day with no memory and a hangover that could kill a moose, and then tell everyone what a great time you had and how you're gong to do it all again next weekend.
Does it really make me a Scrooge-like entity when I say, "Thanks, but I'll pass"? It has nothing to do with a lack of cheery holiday spirit within me. It has to do with the fact that holiday spirit, while cheery in theory, is anything but in practice. Holiday spirit is not benevolent and fun. Holiday spirit ends marriages. Holiday spirit destroys the innocence of children. Holiday spirit kills people.
So, Frosty, stick that in your corn cob pipe and smoke it, you hypothermia-inducing, frozen-toe-losing pile of chemically tainted ice chips.
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