I come to you a changed man. I arrive weary and sore yet invigorated and hopeful, bearing simply a tale of discovery and reinvention, faith and celebration and unmeditated violence and airborne swine. This is the story of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Holiday Season.
It has only been a week since Thanksgiving, but the holiday season is already in full force. Every year this industrially anointed jolly time waxes in length, increasingly soaking up the few remaining waterholes of grey matter in our brains and stretching out its stranglehold on the land like a punishing Serengeti dry season that just won't go away.
If the corporate magnates get what they want, then soon enough it might just never end, leaving us trapped in a cash-churning Mobius strip, forever spiraling toward the next Black Friday.
Sick of eternally scrooging it up as a self-perpetuated outsider and general hater, I proclaimed that this would be the year I joined in on all the rapture-filled mirth and celebrated the holidays with everyone else. I would watch all the tediously repetitive television specials, buy every American Idol reject's holiday album, purchase presents without any forethought or personal touch and stay excruciatingly full and drunk all the while. I would let myself be completely absorbed by the reindeer driven, baby-killing machine, immersing myself in the beauty of the world during this glistening, euphoric and magical season.
I soon realized that I didn't even know what holiday cheer was. What is this spirit that everyone talks about, anyway? Is the world just a dingy, painfully fluorescent-lit gymnasium and are we all just ignorant freshmen participating in a giant pep rally for some miserable high school football team? While this seemed all too plausible, I rejected it because it was too depressing a scenario for the holidays, which should be unconditionally happy times.
So with nowhere to start, I spun my moral compass like an errant Coke bottle, watching as the rusty needle was magnetically propelled toward kindness, my usual disposition. I would go with my gut and be giving and cheerful to all whom I might encounter, all the time full of glee for my neighbors and friends, immortably, sans respite.
Oddly enough, this didn't seem to work. It actually appeared to give everyone at J.C. Penney's, Hammacher Schlemmer and everywhere else I went more reason to push me around and pile on thick layers of rudeness like gelatinous turkey gravy.
Then I had a revelation in the form of a flash of shiny metal. Over the weekend, someone in a bourbon-soaked stupor actually pulled a knife on my friends and I, right in the middle of Dupont.
Fortunately, the puny, weapon-brandishing buffoon and his even more wasted accomplice could barely stand, let alone fight, so tragedy (for us) was avoided. Instead of being appalled, though, everyone around seemed overly excited by the mayhem, chanting and yelling like a pack of rabid carolers.
The next night at a holiday party, things came into sharper focus as I was smacked in the back by chunky slices of honey baked ham, flung across the room by yet another fellow who had had one too many. Like the great Sam J. once quoted, I don't dig on swine, so naturally I verbally let the confused drunk know how little I enjoyed his game, which again, seemed to inspire even more merrymaking from the peanut gallery.
That's when I finally got it. There's a good reason for the increased rate of homicide, suicide, aggravated assault, domestic violence, burglary and alcohol-related accidents during the holiday season. That's the point. What better way to get closer to God and your fellow man than through carnage, squabbling and reckless over-indulgence?
The only thing holding us back from really enjoying the holidays is Christmas. Everyone knows that the holiday season really means the Christmas season, but the Christian model has failed us. We're all just simple pagans during the holidays, obediently idolatrous to anything that will make us feel like we're happy.
So it's time to bring back some Romanesque decadence to this hallowed time of year. Once we dip our heads in the mighty, sewage-infested waters of Hallmark and Randall Stover, we'll all be born again, free to commit senseless acts of brutality without the shadow of penitence looming above.
And that's something we can all celebrate.
