Guest Post: ‘Tis The Season Of Gimmee!
idey-ho folks, it’s the Squatch again. This week, I’d like to spew more bitter garbage, and you folks get to be the lucky recipients. You lucky lil’ devils!
So, for the last two and a half weeks, the local radio stations have been playing Christmas music. It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, and already we have to be inundated with crappy renditions of lame holiday tunes. I can’t begin to tell you how badly this irritates me, but for you lucky, lucky folks…I’ll try.
Now, I may be a dirty liberal atheist, and find no religious satisfaction in the Holiday season, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like presents. Who doesn’t like getting stuff? Heck, I even enjoy being around the whole family for a few hours each year. Anymore than that is pushing it, of course, but a few hours here and there is nice.
What I REALLY hate is when the season is wrapped in plastic and has a price tag on it, and is waved under my nose 60 days before the actual event takes place. The over-commercialization of any holiday makes me want to kick Kris Kringle’s jolly fat ass.
The local mall already has the decorations in place, with the Christmas muzak softly playing in the background. The commercials are even on the television, telling me to not burn my house down trying to cook a turkey in a deep fryer. Which, I wouldn’t mind if they were speaking of Thanksgiving . . . but with the Santa hats, attached clownishly to their heads, it’s a little hard to take them seriously.
It’s not that I’m a Scrooge, or that I hate all holidays. I merely resent the corporations telling me when to feel festive. If I wanted to know “the true meaning of Christmas”, I’ll watch a Charlie Brown special, and decorate a tree. Maybe get sauced on eggnog, till I throw up on Dasher, Dancer, and their reindeer cohorts. Yeah, I got yer “Christmas Cheer” hangin!
It’s now quite obvious that the shopping season comes earlier and earlier each year. Does this make me spend any money sooner, or make me spend more money than I would ordinarily? Nope. Like most people, I have a set list of people I buy presents for, and that’s pretty much it. I don’t feel the need to buy giant inflatable lawn decorations that show off my horrible taste, or blow out power grids from all the Christmas lights hanging from my roof like some grotesque Las Vegas hotel.
I don’t want anything to do with Christmas, until December. I don’t think that’s asking a whole lot. In closing, I’ll leave you with a quote from a very misunderstood, and wise old man: “Any fool who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips, should be boiled in his own pudding.” — Ebenezer Scrooge.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:07 am
This year, the drugstore next to the Restaurant Where I Work™ had their Halloween stuff out at the end of August, their Thanksgiving/Harvest crap out in the middle of September, and their Christmas stuff out at the end of October. It’s disgusting.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:56 am
So, I probably shouldnt invite y’all over in july when i am cranking out christmas carols on the c.d. player hunh?
Might help, squatch-man, if you think of it all in terms of its ancient pagen origins–that it is the attempt of human beings to “give the bird” to the coming darkness. Winter has traditionally been a time of great hardship, and starvation in february was common throughout much of the agragarian world.
Like the poem says: GO NOT GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT. The winter festivals were about RAGING against the cold, the darkness, the loneliness and isolation, the fears and threats that harsh & bitter winters brought. Winter Festivals are all “festivals of light” for a reason. The longest night of the year occurs at the Winter Solstice, and we respond by lighting great fires and keeping them burning.
The 25th of December is DIES NATALIS SOL INVICTICUS–the festival of the UNCONQUERABLE SUN– and Saturnalia honored the god of the sowing of grains–its all about SURVIVAL against all odds. “let us eat, drink and be merry, for tommorrow we may die!” wasnt just a epigram 3000 years ago.
Did you know that the traditional greeting during the festival was, “YO, Saturnalia!” SRSLY. That caroling was originally preformed nude? It was a lot cooler festival back in the day. Ignore the crass commercialization, judge the decorations by their enthusiasm not their artistic merit, and view it all, in all its tawdry glories, as the triumph of the human will to survive.
P.s. dont drive by my house–you could tan with my holiday lights.