Humbug

My favorite thing about Christmas is that it's as far away as you can possibly be (at least during leap years) from next Christmas. Now that we've made it to the day after, Christmas 2005 is already uncomfortably close. Why do I hate Christmas? Is it because, like Nietzsche, I regard Christianity as the life-negating Buddhism of the West? I do in fact hold that view of its Augustinian form. However, the "Christmas" holiday---an event beginning around 11:35 am the day after Halloween and ending around 11:35 pm January 6 (the day of the Epiphany for you non-believers), sandwiching in between these bookends a mega-orgy of Paris-Hilton-mainstreaming commercialism, television programming that's four parts saccharine, three parts shit, and half a part tap water, alongside the idolatrous sanctification of a fat, bearded, red-robed peeping tom who extorts from the nation's (Christian) children a morality of naked self-interest posing righteously as the ethical polarity of "naughty" and "nice"---has exactly nothing to do with the Nazarene religion or the acknowledgement of the incarnation of its Messiah.

Why do I hate Christmas, then? Because it is a bloated monstronsity that has already swallowed Thanksgiving whole, nibbles away at Halloween's backside, and lacking any real fall festivals aside from the mostly-dead Columbus day, threatens to gorge itself on summer holidays even within our lifetimes---the likelihood improves as global warming kicks in and makes summer and winter indistinguishable. (I've seen Christmas lights go up in July myself, and I can't be the only one.) I hate Christmas because it is ravenous and oppressive; because it asserts itself in your face and unrelentingly for a bare minimum of two months out of every year; because it long ago gave up on wishing you a happy month of December and reverted to demanding it; because it is a passive-aggressive bitch that strikes innocent poses while anyone who doesn't enjoy eggnog, fruitcake, nativity scenes, and "family" entertainment, or is just a bit discomfited by commemorations of Our Dear Savior's Birth (ODSB), is accused of being a spoilsport or grinch, or, this year anyway, a secularist infidel fifth columnist.

Conservatives love taking shots at Kwanzaa---and why not, considering that it is, in fact, an exercise in self-esteem-building fraud. I'm not at all sorry if someone takes offense at that comment; truth owes nothing to lies. But in the interest of fairness and balance, it's worth pointing out that while Jesus may or may not have been born on December 25 (the odds are 1 in 365.25), the reason that the holiday is placed on that day is to coincide with a variety of polytheistic winter festivals (ditto for Easter and the spring). There would have been no snow on the ground in the greater Bethlehem area (it gets very little precipitation in the first place), and there were most definitely no fir trees or any other coniferous trees to speak of. As much as the imprimatur of Zoroastrian/Parthian priests might have helped to legitimate the the Nazarenes' fledgling Jewish splinter group, and despite the propensity of Zoroastrians (uniquely among Western religions, I think) to respect the theological views of members of other creeds, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the whole Three Kings story is bollocks. I also have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to anyone who really thinks that there was an immaculate conception sometime around 0 BCE.

I don't, and wouldn't wish Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas or Kraaaazzzzy Kwanzaa or Season's Greetings or Wowee Zowees or Scrumtrilescent Scrumblebums to any of my readers, because I have more respect for them than that. I think they're quite capable of being happy---or not---as they wish and don't require the invention of some phony "season" to do so.