Christmas is the savior of having too much money in our savings account, the reliever of what little sanity we had left and the forgiver of buying more stuff for ourselves than we’re buying for others. It’s also the reason we shake for months into the New Year when we drive by a shopping mall or hear the words “black” and “Friday” in the same sentence.
The Santa Clause says we have to save up all year so we can afford to buy the equivalent of our own toy store. It’s also a way to get kids to behave by threatening them that if they don’t behave, they’ll be in Christmas present hell. We adults don’t fall for the trick of behaving for a guy we never see who watches everything we do and keeps score of who’s been bad and who’s been good.
“The most wonderful time of the year” used to start the day after Thanksgiving when beginning on Black Friday, you couldn’t step out the front door without getting Bing Crosby’s White Christmas drilled into your skull. Christmas actually begins on Arbor Day and ends the day after Washington’s Birthday when using the Gregorian calendar which adds a few days. We need the extra seventy days to shop so there’s really no excuse for showing up Christmas morning with nothing but gift cards.
During the depression, President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving back one week so there would be an extra week of shopping. But retailers have now taken this more time to shop thing to the nth degree by creating more time and more ways to shop. I now get catalogues sent to the house, coupons sent to my email, texts sent to my phone and recently, my navigation said in its best Rosie the Robot voice, “make a right turn for 10% off at Macy’s” which is now open twenty-seven hours a day because I might need to buy my girlfriend a silk nightie, a cotton blouse and a set of steak knives at three a.m.
Christmas takes the cake for being the tackiest holiday. Many people have fake trees even though some of them shed more than real trees; I really like some of the green ones that have a mixture of different branches which make them appear more real. Then some guy invented the sort of real looking fake tree complete with snow sprinkled on the branches. This has somehow evolved into the all white trees which look stranger than green milk on St. Patrick’s Day. My aunt had a silver tree one year that was so gaudy, if I had put it on the street corner in a mini skirt, it could have earned money.
Christmas decorations aren’t just for the home anymore. We chop down a tree outside and bring it inside then we take all of the indoor decorations and bring them outside. My next door neighbor’s front lawn looks like he’s filming Toy Story 4. The guy across the street has an all night Vegas light show that’s so bright, it shines through my bedroom window and I have to put on sun block before I go to bed. And to top it off, the local paper has put my street on the front page for its festive spirit so driving down my street at night is like rush hour in mid-town Manhattan.
Last year, I hosted Christmas because I thought it would be easier than traveling over the river and through the woods to eat what seemed like Thanksgiving leftovers. Before I made the hosting decision, I performed the proper due diligence and I realized hosting isn’t as much fun as it looks on television. I imagined holding a microphone and giving away large amounts of money to undeserving people who are such dolts, they have to look around at others before answering even the simplest of questions. “What’s my name? Oh well, let me think. Do I have any lifelines left?”
The word host is almost hostage and by 1pm Christmas day, I would have paid a queen’s ransom to rescue myself from my guests. Once you make the decision to host, everyone calls with their diet restrictions. Uncle Harold (everyone has one of those) can’t eat dairy because it makes him lactose intolerant so the foods with milk can’t touch the non-milk foods. But he has no problem eating half of the cheesecake that cost $75 because he’s had the Twelve Beers of Christmas. His wife eats enough for a family of uncle’s wives because she thinks she’s “eating for two” for the fourteenth consecutive year and you realize she’ll have to run the seventy miles home if she wants to work off all the food she choked down. And their vegan only-child teenage daughter Katie “can’t eat anything that ever had skin or parents and can’t sit near anyone who does, cause that’s just gross” so you had better have something without meat or milk or fruit or nuts or processed anything or she’ll complain until the spring thaw because Christmas sucks and there’s no Santa for fifteen year olds.
Then, of course, there are the inter-family squabbles and the seating becomes more complicated than a United Nations dinner: “Syria can’t sit next to Israel because Syria didn’t get invited to the wedding” and “China never got back change from the tolls when we took that road trip with the United States twenty years ago” and “Canada, well Canada is just Canada”. Asking anyone to pass anything would be like asking Brett Farve to pass the ball eighty yards down field while throwing underhand on a blitz; the dinner would turn into the food fight scene from Animal House.
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas but my finances are in the red and the Christmas lights made my skin black and I’m green with envy because my neighbor got another 165” television that’s like a drive in movie with better sound and I’m blue because Christmas only comes once a year.
