Ho Fucking Ho

It's around this time of year (and by "this time of year" I mean late November/early December) that I start to get accused of being a "Grinch" or a "Scrooge" or even (in a level of hyperbole that makes me sound like an '80s children's cartoon villain) that I'm "allergic to joy."  So, I figure, what the fuck, I might as well talk about it on my blog where I can make my point and you can tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

So when I was a kid, Christmas was one day.  December 25th.  Not only was it only one day, but it was the most special, magical day of the year.  Christmas was so special, in fact, that the day before was so riddled with anticipation that it was a special day, too: Christmas Eve.  Imagine that: a day so special, so noteworthy, that just the fact that you were almost there was worth celebrating.

As long as we're talking about the way things were way back in the 1900s, "Black Friday" was almost exclusively a technical term that people in retail used.  It was the day you either got out of the red and into the black (accounting terms for being in debt vs. drawing a profit) or else you were fucked and your business would probably shutter.  Sure, it was the de facto biggest shopping day of the year, but that was more a matter of nobody ever thought about Christmas until Thanksgiving was over, and then since you probably had Black Friday off anyway...you started your Christmas shopping.

And thirdly, this may be almost impossible to believe now, but if you didn't celebrate Christmas...it was no big deal.  I remember I couldn't have been older than five or six and I had already begun to understand that since Christmas was a Christian holiday, not everybody celebrated it.  I asked my mother how to handle that, and I remember her saying, "Well, if you're with your family like Uncle Ken or your grandmother, you know we're Christians, so it's okay to say 'Merry Christmas.'  And if you're not, you can wait and see if they say 'Merry Christmas' to you and then you can say it back.  Or if you're not sure, just say, 'Happy Holidays' because that includes everybody."

Sounds like some pretty sane goddamn advice, huh?

I used to love Christmas.  When I was little, sure, I got excited to the point of pissing my pants about what kind of new toys I would get.  And every Christmas morning was just this astonishing time when it felt like you were set for a whole year or longer.  If there was going to be a new video game system, it was going to come to you at Christmas, and that was just years and years of play.  If there was going to be a new bike, or a new movie or just about anything that would be awesome and last forever, it was going to come at Christmas.  Birthdays were nice, and sometimes you got nice things, but they were never as nice as what you got at Christmas.  Birthdays were something to get excited about a few weeks ahead of time.  Christmas was something to be excited about all year.

And when I got older, Christmas became a time of deep religious reflection for me.  Easter is, I know, the holiest day of the year, and if you spend all of Holy Week in reflection it can be deeply satisfying when Easter finally comes.  But Christmas was different, I think because of where it fell on the calendar.  Christmas is and always has been a time to forget about the grim bleakness of winter and for one shining day come together with friends and family and cast out the dark.  The religious component of Christmas was similar to me.  You know that one shining star, the Star of Bethlehem, that stands out in the night sky?  That's what Christmas was like.

And of course, as Will Ferrell pointed out somewhat idiotically in "The Legend of Ricky Bobby," everybody loves Baby Jesus.  Baby Jesus is full of potential.  Nailed-to-the-Cross Jesus, well, that's pretty much just a reminder of our collective shame.  Perhaps what was unusual about Christmas, at least to a practicing Catholic, is that a religion which usually acted as a yoke, a reminder of all the guilt we bore, and all the guilt we should bear for all the shit we're constantly getting wrong and that Jesus had to get crucified for, for fuck's sake, but on Christmas that same religion was a source of joy and wonder.  Easter is about glory, but Christmas is about joy. 

Now, I'm not going to blog about sea changes in American religious/political life and that sort of thing.  I'm not even remotely qualified to talk about that.  And neither am I going to talk about losing my faith.  Even for the utterly faithless, spending a nice day exchanging gifts with your friends and loved ones is enjoyable.  I couldn't tell you what caused it, but I can damn well tell you that during the last 25 years, shit has changed.  All of a sudden, Christmas isn't one day.  Christmas is two goddamned months.  As soon as Halloween is over, suddenly storefronts are all Santafied and the radio stations start flipping, one by one, zombie-like, to non-stop Christmas music. 

Suddenly, shopping is a quasi-religious, quasi-patriotic duty.  If you're not constantly spending money on Christmas gifts and Christmas decorations from November 1 to December 24, you're a Bad American and a Terrible Christian.  Black Friday is no longer black because that's the kind of ink you used to indicate a profit in the ledgers - Black Friday is black because of the dark, perverse imp that makes people trample one another for a slightly reduced price plasma screen TV.

Think about that.  In other countries, they riot for water, for bread, for democracy.  In America we riot for the chance to buy shit cheaply. 

Now Black Friday is encroaching on Thanksgiving, and that's barely even a holiday anymore, except as a prelude to Christmas.  Christmas Christmas Christmas.  It's non-stop fucking Christmas.  My special little holiday when I could laugh with my family and even feel close to God has become an abhorrent, corporatized bacchanal.

Not a lot of people argue that Christmas has become too commercialized.  This was a worry of the pilgrims four hundred fucking years ago.  And in a culture that values capitalism and worships the almighty dollar to the exclusion of practically everything else, not loving the commercialized version of Christmas is tantamount to treason. 

So, worse than even being commercialized, now Christmas is politicized.  Again, I could write whole blogposts, whole books, really, about the Christian churches in this country becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party, but let us suffice it to say that I could stand to never hear the ridiculous fucking term "War on Christmas" again.  Guess what?  You don't need gaudy mangers in front of every courthouse and for every clerk in the country to wish you a "Merry Christmas" to "win" Christmas.  In fact, the whole idea of "winning" Christmas is so utterly repellent, so antithetical to the point of a religious, family-centered...

Sigh.  But I digress.

The Starbucks cup thing?  Yeah, I know.  That was intensely stupid, and as far as anyone can tell there was one guy in America who was offended by it, and made an angry YouTube video about it, and that's about where the outrage began and ended.  But how much of my fucking life was taken up by this stupid, non-scandal?  How much of my life every year is taken up by stupid non-scandals?  How come now people are belligerent about saying "Merry Christmas," like they're somehow rubbing it in your face that they're Christians with a capital "C?"  How come "Happy Holidays," which was supposed to be a polite, benign greeting for the public, non-religious sphere, is treated by some people as though I'm saying "Fuck you" to them?

You know what, I don't want to hear about Christmas when I go to the hardware store on December 5.  I don't want to hear about it, I don't want to think about it, and I certainly don't want someone to belligerently shout it in my face.  In case you don't get it: spending two months insisting that it's the "Christmas season" is belligerent.  It's not kind or folksy or welcoming.  In fact, it's the exact opposite of all that.  If it was December 25, or, hell, I'm not that picky, December 23, and somebody on the street said, "Merry Christmas" to me I'd smile and say it back.  Because that's when Christmas is!

Now we have congress insisting that they can't work the whole month of December because religious liberty.  That's not religious liberty, that's being an asshole.  That's trying to take three weeks off for a one-day religious holiday.  I mean, shit, I might understand trying to take a month off if it was Ramadan, which is an actual month-long celebration, but there aren't any asshole Muslims out there constantly shouting "Happy Ramadan!" in my face and bemoaning the "War on Ramadan" every year.  You know why?  Because they keep their religious feelings to their goddamn selves.  And hell, could you imagine the outcry from those same Christmas-pushing lunatics if American Muslims actually did try to start pushing Ramadan like that?  Oh my God, it would be off the rails.

So, yeah.  I'm not a "Grinch."  I'm not a "Scrooge."  I'm happy to celebrate Christmas with my family on December 25, and even a few days before.  But now that we've commercialized, politicized, and bastardized it into this leering, months-long nightmare of enforced joy and constantly shouting about what bad Americans anyone who doesn't want to spend two months celebrating a simple, religious holiday are, I kind of hate it.