The animated Grinch made his first appearance on TV this last weekend, Santa hats are stacked with great care at drugstores countrywide, and empty lots across America are being filled with the innumerable victims of the traditional holiday arboreal genocide, all meaning one thing. Yet again, it is THAT time of the year, whether we like it or not. And with this weekend, following the mass ritual sacrifice of the turkey and the consumption thereof, the Holiday Season gains the unstoppable momentum to hurl downward to the last days of December. (I discount New Year's as more a post-traumatic response of getting festive to forget the wads of cash spent on Christmas.) And with this, I find myself ready to share the sheer joy that comes from living through those days focused on the vaguely approximate birthdate of a Jewish carpenter fated to die in horrific and tortuous death to help cleanse all mankind of the dark sinful blemish of descending of God's original couple who couldn't stick to eating oranges.
If my ever-so-subtly acerbic tone has not escaped you, my gentle readers (all 5 of you,) you could come to believe that I am unenthused, even slightly bitter, about Christmas time and to deduce my genuine dislike for the Holidays. Now let me set you straight, I do not dislike Christmas. "Dislike" is clearly the incorrect word. Much too weak. Hate. Now hate is much closer. Still off, really, as I don't simply hate the Holidays, I hate them with the deepest and foulest dark hatred. It's just about the only thing I feel comfortably justified in hating so passionately, not just that usual opinionated detestation, but with spite and malice born in every nerve and fiber of my being. Indeed, I look forward to December in the way one awaits the major recurrance of hemmoroids. By the end of the season, I look forward to the traditional drowning my a pool of my own bile and reaching upward with both arms not to save myself; but to try in my delerium to snap Santa's fat neck.
I could too easily blame my feelings solely on the crass commercialism and sophorific sappiness, but those things are but symptom of the red and green cancer festering in the holiday bowels. The true horror is in knowing there is no escape from Christmas, in all its manifest quasi-religious cheese, and glorious chintz. After nineteen Christmas as a good Jewish boy, and then another thirteen as an avowed heretic, here comes number 34, before which I am helpless to prevent it's stranglehold on my psyche. Again I will realize freshly that I know more carols than I know Hebrew songs. I will ride a tsunami of insincere holiday greetings from faceless people who think they are being nice to me. The doom has come again.
With this be the holiday where I finally snap after being put on hold and subjected to the fiftieth time of having Burl Ives wish me a musical "Holly Jolly Christmas" or after the sight of the manger scene, complete with light-up baby Jesus, on someone's lawn?
If my ever-so-subtly acerbic tone has not escaped you, my gentle readers (all 5 of you,) you could come to believe that I am unenthused, even slightly bitter, about Christmas time and to deduce my genuine dislike for the Holidays. Now let me set you straight, I do not dislike Christmas. "Dislike" is clearly the incorrect word. Much too weak. Hate. Now hate is much closer. Still off, really, as I don't simply hate the Holidays, I hate them with the deepest and foulest dark hatred. It's just about the only thing I feel comfortably justified in hating so passionately, not just that usual opinionated detestation, but with spite and malice born in every nerve and fiber of my being. Indeed, I look forward to December in the way one awaits the major recurrance of hemmoroids. By the end of the season, I look forward to the traditional drowning my a pool of my own bile and reaching upward with both arms not to save myself; but to try in my delerium to snap Santa's fat neck.
I could too easily blame my feelings solely on the crass commercialism and sophorific sappiness, but those things are but symptom of the red and green cancer festering in the holiday bowels. The true horror is in knowing there is no escape from Christmas, in all its manifest quasi-religious cheese, and glorious chintz. After nineteen Christmas as a good Jewish boy, and then another thirteen as an avowed heretic, here comes number 34, before which I am helpless to prevent it's stranglehold on my psyche. Again I will realize freshly that I know more carols than I know Hebrew songs. I will ride a tsunami of insincere holiday greetings from faceless people who think they are being nice to me. The doom has come again.
With this be the holiday where I finally snap after being put on hold and subjected to the fiftieth time of having Burl Ives wish me a musical "Holly Jolly Christmas" or after the sight of the manger scene, complete with light-up baby Jesus, on someone's lawn?
1 Comments:
I should send you a dreidel for Chanukah.
Post a Comment
<< Home