Ruminations on Christmas

 Hello. I was going to write an article entitled "How to Destroy the Holiday Industrial Complex with Weaponized Cringe" and it is a very good article and it is about 1/2 done and I may repurpose it for new years or easters or next Christmas or I may forget about it entirely. It is what it is. (I don't know why I made Easter plural. Don't worry.)

Instead I am writing this substantially less funny and substantially more psychologically distressing passage about Christmas and my thoughts on it.

Christmas is a holiday in December that a lot of people celebrate because of this thing called 'Christianity'. I am not personally a card-carrying member of this whole 'Christianity' thing, but I am still forced to celebrate it, and I am not sure why.

The object of Christmas is to give gifts to each other I think because that's supposed to be good. In practice, this means people assume you want things, and they hand them to you and you either want them or pretend to want them. I am so bad at the whole Christmas thing that I seem like I don't want the things I want. Having to pretend to want things is above my pay grade.

There is also music which begins to play like a month before Christmas and keeps playing until about 2 seconds after Christmas Day ends. This music is occasionally fun. My favorite Christmas song is "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney, which is not a song that people like, but I have a spiritual connection with it. I avoid this song because it makes me cry. The last time I listened to this song was in June and it made me cry. When I was in my sophomore year of high school the teacher asked me what my favorite Christmas song was and I lied and I said "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love was my favorite, which everyone was very confused by, which I don't understand because it comes on the radio about every 30 minutes during the entire month of December. That is also quite a good Christmas song, which I enjoy.

Other Christmas songs are very annoying, especially some of the newer ones they come out with. There is a song called "Christmas Wrapping" by the Waitresses and I just remembered that I actually like this song so I am not sure why it is in this paragraph. All I know is that sometimes people play these songs while you are supposed to be unwrapping presents and it is too much. I cannot pretend to want things and listen to music at the same time. This is arduous to my soul and contributes immensely to my discomfort with Christmas.

There is also a whole lot of hullabaloo about Santa, who is not a real person. He is also not a religious figure that you are supposed to actually believe in, unless you are a child up to the age of around 7, according to former U.S. President Donald Trump. This is very confusing. All of the adults in the world tell the children to believe in Santa and are horrified by the very concept of their children not believing in him, even taking their children to sit in the laps of various middle-aged men who pretend to be Santa, but none of the adults believe in Santa whatsoever. It is a cultural tradition to lie to children on a massive scale, and people are frequently very annoying about this fact, and say that the adults are being abusive. I am not sure if I believe that, but it is immensely confusing. I first came to the conclusion that Santa wasn't real after looking at the NORAD Santa tracker at about age 8 and realizing that if Santa was moving that fast, the effects of aerodynamic heating would kill him. I was not like most children.

There is much mythology built around Santa. He has a wife and he employs many elves to make toys. He has reindeer and the reindeer have names and one of them is named Rudolph and is very important. There is a lot of media built around this mythology. Some of it is quite delightful and warms the soul and invigorates the spirit. There are many stop motion animations created by a company called 'Rankin-Bass' which are very delightful. The most famous of these animations is probably "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," which is about Rudolph, the important reindeer, who does have a red nose. The story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer inspired another movie called "Olive, The Other Reindeer" (a pun relating to a song involving Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), which is also fun. I mostly know it exists because John Linnell of They Might Be Giants (who I admire greatly) wrote an oddly morose song about it, however I have also seen the movie with a bunch of people who also like They Might Be Giants and I can confirm that it is also fun. (I am one of 60 people who have liked the included YouTube upload of "Olive the Other Reindeer" by John Linnell, and this is a badge I wear with pride.)

Unquestionably, the most movie Christmas is "A Charlie Brown Christmas", which is a movie about Christmas and Charlie Brown. It inspires a deep sense of anguish in me for a life I never lived. The soundtrack is quite nice and the guy who plays the piano on it plays the piano quite in a good fashion. When I was a kid I wished that trees could talk to me, and they never did. This is when I learned that the world is unfair.

If I had to plan Christmas for me I would sit around and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas for an extended length of time and drink some egg-nog (a confusing Christmas drink which tastes good) under some blankets because Christmas is in the winter time and it is cold then. However, unfortunately, most of the time you spend Christmas going to someone else's house and talking to family or watching as other people go into your own house and then having to talk to them.

They ask me questions about myself and I don't know what to say, sometimes. They ask me how I am doing at college and I smile and nod and then realize I was supposed to be answering questions and it makes me sad. I feel as if they are trying to get me to play a part in a Christmas play (not an actual Christmas play, as those exist) and I fail to do the required tasks and it makes me sad. I would rather play Kerbal Space Program or go on a walk with one of my friends in the forest and talk about the meaning of life.

It is all a rather facetious method of communication. I like communicating with people a lot, but when it comes in Christmas time, it is all people you have not talked to in months and months and you catch up with them and they catch up with you and by the time you are all caught up both of you leave again for an extended period of time. If you try to talk about the meaning of life, everyone stares at you. Also, the Christmas phenomenon has a lot to do with putting a lot of people into one room, and I don't like that. I like talking to a few people at a time, but Christmas demands otherwise.

The gift-giving element of Christmas is also mildly frustrating. I already have most of the things that I want, except a fidget toy which isn't a bike lock, and a rocket poster, and a friend within 5 miles of me who is willing to go on a walk through a forest and talk about the meaning of life at 11:05 pm on Christmas. I ask for money every year for Christmas, because you can ask for things, and people get them for you. People get me things that aren't money and some of them are things that I want and others of them I am just forced to invite into my life. Every Christmas I accrue a greater collection of things invited into my life. This Christmas I now own two hoodies. I will probably use the hoodies, but I was not aware of their existence, and I don't know if I needed them. This fact is frustrating.

I often think about making a list of things which I want for Christmas, but I don't know what I want and the list of things which I do want is not nearly long enough to accommodate all of the relatives who are obligated to buy things for me. It is also rather hard to buy a friend. I tell them that I just want money and nothing else, but somehow it is a bad thing to only get me the thing that I ask for. This is also frustrating.
I got lots of candy this Christmas. This has happened many Christmasses before. I will eat some of it and forget about the rest.

Another major element of Christmas are the decorations. You are expected to decorate your house for Christmas and put up lights, which is fun. It is a pastime to drive by other people's houses and look at their lights and admire their disposable incomes. There are also lights inside the house, which is less fun. There are also many, many other decorations. Those who do not decorate are accused of not being festive and not Christmassing enough in their Christmas.

The oddest element of Christmas is the religious element. The Christ part of Christmas is derived from Jesus Christ, an important guy of Christianity, which is a big religion which a lot of people do. People are always concerned that the Democrats are trying to take the Christ out of Christmas. There is an odd dualistic relationship between Christ and Santa. People who like Santa more claim that Santa is derived from Saint Nicholas, and is therefore also religious. Realistically, I do not think Saint Nicholas has much in common with a chubby old man with a long beard who rides a magical, reindeer-led flying sleigh and subjects elves to dubious working conditions at the North Pole. The whole situation is very multi-layered and each of these layers makes it a bit more ridiculous. Christmas is ostensibly the holiday in which Jesus was born, but Jesus was not even born on this day. In fact Christmas was invented after they inserted Jesus into the old Roman holiday of Saturnalia, so perhaps the Santaification of Christmas is nothing but an ongoing cycle. Saturn is my favorite planet. The Roman God called Saturn also inspired a very cool painting by Francisco Goya, which I will not show here, because it is quite scary.

I wanted to end that paragraph with a point, but I am unsure of what point to make. My parents never raised me on the religious aspects of Christmas so it seems to exist as a cultural thing. Annoying people would assert that the modern bastardization of Christmas was invented by capitalists and Christmas is nothing more than a capitalistic excuse to spend money on wrapping paper and unwanted gifts. These annoying people have a good point, but this counter-narrative is almost as mainstream as the main narrative, so I do not want to talk about it very much. Perhaps the most relevant thing I can include is that The Residents (one of the seminal Experimental Rock bands from the United States) have a song called Santa Dog where they say that "Santa Dog's a Jesus Fetus, has no presents, has no presence, in the future." I think this is probably accurate. Richard Nixon was mailed this song, and he probably liked it, because it's a good song.

I think I have pretty much covered most of my important thoughts on Christmas. It's a holiday that exists. There are parts of it I like and other parts that I don't. I am glad that I wrote this article and shared my thoughts and I hope that you enjoyed reading it and it perhaps inspired some novel thoughts about Christmas and/or life in general in your brain. The idea of enriching another person's life by expressing my thoughts in language is an emboldening one, and it makes the ridiculousness of life more tolerable.
The world is strange and confusing and sad and lonely, but we have each other, in the end.

It's going to be okay. Merry Christmas.

 

Special thanks to my good friend Pat for providing grammatical advice. I wish them many good Christmasses in future.