Cintra Wilson
It’s Holiday time again, and it’s the most wonderful time of year if you’re an upper-middle-class Methodist mom in the middle of the country, living in a sprawling, ranch-style house that glows like a jewel box in the snowy landscape and just screams “cozy.” Your glamorous and intelligent children are rushing home for the holidays in colorful woolens from their universities back East. Everyone is looking forward to singing carols in the original German around the grand piano and arguing about poetry and legal torts around the grand ol’ fir tree. Whole haunches of aged Angus are dragged out of the garage livestock refrigerator along with ducks that Dad shot, and hams are fruitily decorated to look like Pucci dartboards. The scent of fragrant pine blends with the salivary aromas of sugar, pork, clove, and burning butter. Affluent and witty neighbors stroll by drawing an old sled to drop off large steaming pies and expensive gifts wrapped in metallic paper.
Great-grand-nonny’s real silver lies on the table next to the Wedgwood gravy boat and the whimsical party crackers imported from England. Elaborate wreaths of holly surround thick scented candles above the roaring fireplace. There are a few well-behaved and precocious three- and four-year-olds who scamper about in little plush footie suits and say stunningly hilarious things about “Tanta Coz tumming dowd the chimby!” Their innocent joy is palpable and infectious.
Then there’s everyone else: the vast majority of lessfortunate people in the world who fucking dread the holidays. They spend Xmas in their lousy apartments lighting cigarettes off the space heater, unshaven and sniveling, wearing the clothes they slept in, drinking vodka straight out of the plastic-handle jug, and watching the burning Yule Log on TV until it actually seems to have dialogue.
Holiday cheer is scarce for the lonely, broke, and downtrodden. The only reindeer those people are likely to encounter is the one on the front of the Jagermeister bottle. The aggressively cheerful facade of the holiday season holds nothing for the desperate, and tacitly implies that the disheveled sad sack has failed by not creating an idyllic and luxurious family situation for himself, if for no other reason than the sake of hosting this annual holiday virus.
Many people are forced to stave off severe seasonal depression by such jarring stimuli as big-death action movies. It is no coincidence that many of the biggest-budget, Schwarzenegger-genre, shoot-’emin-the-face films open on Xmas Day. Watching wrathful murders makes depressed people feel strong. They walk home in the cold to their empty apartments, hopped up on the sexy pump of rage, hoping some reasonable-size asshole will say something obnoxious to them so they can feel justified in kicking him until he doesn’t move anymore.
“Howdya like that, heh?” One fantasizes leering as the sorry perp squirms in the gutter. “Merry F-ing Christmas.”
This violent escapism is certainly less painful than staying home and watching It’s a Wonderful Life and crying hot, piteous tears for yourself when everything turns out to be OK at the end. “When will I get my happy ending?” you sob between pizza nuggets. Not this Xmas.
Those in the lower to middle class who suffer suburban holidays endure a whole other variety of torture, primarily in the form of needless family strain. There is an unwritten law, probably espoused by the airline industry, that long-distance families, even those who don’t really like each other, are supposed to fork over vast sums to travel to be together for the winter holidays.
The airlines, writhing flirtily with profit, really go all the way with their holiday spirit and usually show as their in-flight “entertainment” some vomitously cloying Xmas propaganda porn flick with a title like The Greatest Gift Ever, wherein a high-school student has a kidney removed to save his beloved great-aunt, Debbie Reynolds; everyone recovers in time to sing “Silent Night” and cry with deep familial joy.
Once one finally gets home, one is forced to embrace soused, embarrassing relatives with handlebar moustaches whom one would rather never see again, and laugh indulgently when unwrapping such appalling and worthless gift items as rainbow-toe socks and electric tongue-scrapers. Yuletide food is usually a throwback to the days of frenzied pagan gluttony and the Satanic zeal that cookbooks in the 1950s had for the excessive uses of starch, shortening, and meat drippings. Since ninety-eight percent of the women in America hate their bodies too much to tolerate having flesh on them, the holidays are a time of either painful abstinence or outright self-loathing.
Xmas today is a feverish, mindless, and unregenerate overspending orgy. It is the Great Guilt Trip, the buya-little-something-for-everyone-you-love disease that corporate America has infected our lives with, via the Trojan horse of a “religious holiday.” To personify and encourage this lemming-like leap into massive consumer debt, we have our charming, portly mascot Saint Nick. I discovered after perusing Butler’s indispensable classic, Lives of the Saints, that Saint Nicholas’s biography has suffered horribly from telephone-style bastardization. Saint Nicholas of Myra was a pious young man in fourth-century Asia Minor who came into money following the death of his well-off parents. Upon hearing of a local man who had plans to sell his three daughters into prostitution, Nicholas threw a small sack of money through the man’s window, providing the oldest girl with a dowry and thus enabling her to marry. As the other two girls came of age, he performed the same charitable act to offset their future whoredom. As a result, Saint Nicholas was represented in visual folklore as someone who tossed small sacks around. Due to the crude artistic renderings of these sacks, many early Christians mistook the sacks for children’s heads, giving rise to the rumor that Saint Nick had rescued and revived three children who had been slain by an evil innkeeper and subsequently pickled in a brine tub. Thus, Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of children. In short, the true legend of Saint Nicholas is a damned far cry from a fat, bearded yutz from the North Pole who slides down the chimney and brings Barbies and Hot Wheels to all the children of the world. If you’re considering selling your children into prostitution, perhaps you’ll get a visit from Saint Nick. Taken into actual historical context, the whole charade of going to Macy’s to let one’s children climb into the lap of a drunk who looks like he’s been upholstered by Italian pimps in order for them to bark out their greedy consumer object lust is bogus and unwarranted, and the chilling result of corporate brainwashing.
There are positive aspects of Xmas that people tend to dwell on when struggling to achieve the “holiday spirit.” Xmas is the only time of year when senior citizens get dragged out of whatever urine-cave they are inhabiting and are allowed to mingle with the general population. There are lots of parties, which enables lonely single people to raid their friends’ medicine cabinets for Vicodin.
And there is that moment sometimes, when a transcendent hush falls over the dark street, and there is some unnameable thrill in the icy air, a collective human exuberance, and one looks at the tiny blinking stars through the spidery fingers of naked trees and feels full of a weird and wild hope.
But I usually miss that moment because I’m pouring boiling water all over some child’s snowman. I’ve compiled a list of other holiday activities to offset Yuletide misanthropy:
A two-headed baby Jesus is also a fun changeling substitution.
Another fun one is to rip up cotton balls and throw ketchup on them, in front of the fireplace. That way, when everyone comes into the living room for Xmas morning, you can say, “Uh-oh. White hair and blood. Looks like the dog got him. Poor Santa.”
The important thing to remember is that “festivity” is relative. No matter who you are, you deserve to have a happy holiday, and you should make sure you get one by any means necessary.
In excelsis, by Deo.