Thursday, December 22, 2011

Another F*cking Christmas Post


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And that's what drove me to drink. ~ xlibber