As some of you who've been
paying attention might have noticed, Christmas and I aren't on the
best of terms. I wouldn't say I hate Christmas; hate is kind of a
strong word. I wouldn't, for instance, kidnap Christmas, throw it in
my trunk, drive it out into the middle of the woods and torture it to
death with an icepick, or anything like that. But if I bumped into
Christmas at the bar, I'd chat with it as briefly as possible before
latching onto somebody else, like New Year's Eve or St. Patrick's Day
– I like those guys.
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| But not as much as I like Halloween. ~ P.L. Armstrong |
The thing about Christmas
is, it's not just a holiday. Hell, it's not even a holiday. It's a
full-scale stress-a-thon. Christmas is even listed on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, a professionally-established list of 43 things
that can stress you out enough to make you ill even unto death. The
Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale awards “stress points” to each item
on the list, and if you rack up enough of these points in a year's
time, you could die.
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| Not unlike Weight Watchers. ~ John Phelan |
And Christmas makes the
list. Granted, it's number 42 on the list, but it's still on the
list, along with such events as “death of a spouse,”
“imprisonment,” and “foreclosure.” Not that I'm freakin'
surprised. Just last night, when we were trimming the tree, my
grandmother's elderly dog tried to eat a string of lights. Or
possibly something on the floor beneath the string of lights. Anyway,
it was somewhat stressful.
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| Also, my phone camera sucks. |
I can imagine that Christmas
could be really stressful, what with all the caroling,
church-attending, card-dispatching, partying, gift-buying,
gift-wrapping, awful sweater-wearing, tree-trimming, home
illumination, and what not. I've been abroad for the past three
Christmases, so, since I didn't have any family around and since I'm
a weird recluse anyway, I didn't bother with a lot of celebrating. I
recently realized how much I liked it that way, right around the time
I set about untangling the first string of lights.
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| Why do we even need lights? Baby Jesus didn't have lights. ~ Daniel Schwen |
Of course, there's always
the media-induced PRESSURE to buy JUST THE RIGHT GIFT and from what I
can gather, they'd have you believe you need lots of them, too. I
might be the only person in the world who gets her Christmas shopping
done in two hours at Wal-Mart. Maybe I'll spend some time on Amazon,
if I haven't left it to the last minute.
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| But you know I have. |
Not to mention, there's all
the b*tching and moaning about how we're not allowed to say “Merry
Christmas” anymore, although you could've fooled me, because I've
been saying it regularly for a week and no one's punched me or burst
into tears yet.
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| YET. ~ Malene Thyssen |
A healthy amount of
eye-rolling is all I need to deal with most of this Christmas-related
sh*t. Then, there's the music.
No other holiday, as far as
I'm aware, requires us all to play annoying songs for four weeks. You
occasionally get some twangy country star crooning about the American
Way on the Fourth of July, but that only lasts for a day, and it
doesn't take up every second of air time on every station. They don't
slip them into your commercial breaks when you're trying to watch
Sister Wives. They're unobstrusive.
Years ago, before I became
so awesome, I used to work in retail, and I was forced to listen to
“Christmas in Killarney” until my head asploded.
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| It was lucky I was wearing a helmet. |
Retail jobs at Christmas
time are bad enough without feeling the constant need to deafen
yourself with two pencils. You've got some old lady shopping for
candles at one in the morning, you've got to turn back up before dawn
for the door-buster, you've narrowly escaped being trampled on
several occasions and you actually have been trampled at least
twice – and to top it all off, you've got to listen to some dumb
b*tch cover “Last Christmas” for the umpteenth f*cking time.
Honestly, you guys, holidays and music DO NOT MIX.
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| And that's what drove me to drink. ~ xlibber |
