christmas sneer

I would start off this holiday entry by recalling a happy memory I had as a child. Perhaps, sitting around the Christmas tree with family members, talking soft nonsense to the sound of some really stupid and outdated Christmas album that you have to buy from the TV and is not sold in stores. I’d recall the soft wrinkles in my great grandmother’s face, how her face squished up like crumpled napkin whenever she watched her grandchildren play. I’d talk about the smooth and steady smells that poured from the kitchen all night on Christmas Eve, and how I totally got the bicycle I wanted on Christmas morning.

            Yet that never happened. I don’t have a great grandmother and on Christmas morning we’d always play the new albums we’d just gotten, I remember the year it was Michael Jackson’s Dangerous and it played on repeat all day long. But I was ten then and didn’t realize my lack of respect for holiday tunes would over-lap into my teens and be a perfect accompaniment to the cynical attitude I’d later possess when it came to the holidays.

            There is something to be said about being a cynic during the holiday, or maybe the holiday brings out the cynic in all of us. For me, now, sitting outside of my shitty job taking long drags off a cheap cigarette watching two toddlers in matching red sweaters with parents too old to have kids entering the store, what comes over me is not the shiny cheer that perhaps the stupid blonde bitch I went to school with feel, but rather a feeling of bitter hate wrapped in a cynical imagination- as I think of one of the children’s sweater sleeve, it was too long after all, getting caught it the automatic door and falling to the ground as the door malfunctions and begins to close on his head over and over and over again. I think about he was the less attractive of the two kids anyway and I bet the parents secretly were happy it was him that took the fall.   

            When I used to go home for Christmas I used to feel it was less about the holidays and more about steadfast bitching and lots of good wine. I would gather in the corner of my aunt’s sprawling house with expensive oak floors and convince my cousin and my brother that pot brownies were a good idea for an astounding Christmas Holiday. In fact, we did eat those brownies on Christmas and giggled all through dinner and late into the night, recalling past memories while super stoned and a little buzzed. At the time I suppose I assumed it was my consistent dismay for holidays that had made me travel from state to state with three pot brownies in my suitcase, but now I realize that it is only the season itself that allowed me to have the balls to do it.

            For me now, cynicism around Christmas seems trite and outdated. I feel like I have reached a spot where I can truly appreciate what the holiday season means, even if, for me, it means getting stoned with my cousins and being nostalgic. Even if it means I get to have outlandish and violent fantasies about the children who dress like reindeers getting mutilated, even if I hate the music and the holiday cheer or whatever you want to call it, for me it means being engaged in things that are out of the ordinary and meeting up with those I rarely see. And furthermore, it seems like free wine everywhere you go.

            Christmas is fucking awesome. It’s this one time a year when things around you, wherever you are, get a little skewed, a little different, a little decorated with giant glowing snow men that my dogs always bark it. It’s when you hang out with your family, both immediate and extended and make small talk, avoid eye contact, and feel really really uncomfortable when they try and force you to have your life figured out. It’s when, even though you may be horribly poor, spend that extra bit of money you have on that fucking moron you don’t even like because you pulled his name at your work’s secret santa drawing. Then buy him Happy Gilmore on clearance at Wal-Mart cause he seems like the type.

            The point of it is, no matter how fucking shitty Christmas seems, what with all the corporatism and capitalizing on people’s weaknesses, it’s still something different, and it’s still unique to each person. Your personal Christmas becomes a part of who you are, who you will be, and who you have always been, it’s a story every one has and everyone tells a little bit different.

            So I’m still cynical when it comes to those ignorant, annoying carolers who have nothing better to do with their time except for annoy the shit out of me, I’ve found a place where I am at peace with them, I even say I like them, it even prompts me to write kind of mushy, spirited essays.  

            So perhaps my memories aren’t quite as picturesque as the scenario at the Christmas tree, with a great grandmother I don’t have, but my Christmas memories are indeed distinct from my others and in mine there is always better music playing.