I think The Waitresses said it best...

Merry Christmas, but I think I'll miss this one this year. I wait all year to hear that song on the radio. They cut it close this year, I just heard it tonight. Let's work on that for next year.

Anyway, yeah, Christmas has become my second least favorite holiday if you count the idiotic bullshit that is Valentine's Day. If you, like me, do not count it then it is my least favorite. It's not the thing itself, I mean who wouldn't want some peace on earth and good will toward men, but what it's become. I saw the first store displays go up before Halloween this year. That's insane. Two months in advance with Halloween and Thanksgiving still to come? Asinine. Then of course the corpse of Thanksgiving isn't even cold and Black Friday sends the entire thing swirling into the whirlpool of madness. If I have to see one more fucking commercial insinuate that husbands don't love their wives unless they buy them expensive, shiny and ultimately pointless shit I may have to kill someone.

Then of course just going about normal routines will send you to anger management therapy. Look you pack of gotards, your dumb asses don't read any other time of year so why the fuck are you crowding all my book stores? I'm here every week and now because you know some dude that totally read that book that one time I have to wait in line for 20 minutes to make my regularly scheduled purchases? See also the stores where I buy movies and music. You people clearly don't know what you're doing judging by the confused looks on your faces so just get whoever it is a gift card and they'll sort out what they want on their own, OK? This way you the poor bastard you're shopping for won't have to ask if you saved the receipt or just throw away whatever you got them and you won't take the chance of being savagely beaten by the store regulars that you're pissing off.

Ugh.

It's all become about greed and what are you getting me. I don't really understand it probably because we were really fucking poor and we didn't write gift lists or expect lots of presents or any of that crap. The thing I still look forward to most is dinner. I do love Christmas dinner. But I hate stressing about what people might want and they certainly aren't going to tell me (my mother and sisters this is. I've known some people that would tell me, at great length, what they might want. And it's not even that I mind buying gifts, ask around I'm fairly generous, I just prefer it to be a little more spontaneous, y'know?) and by the time it's Christmas morning my brain is fried and I've usually made myself pretty miserable. But still...dinner.

When exactly did we go from a celebration of the birth of the Christian messiah to a feeding frenzy of commercialism and slobbering greed? How exactly did that happen? I don't even subscribe to any of the Christian faiths and it still leaves me feeling a little queasy to think about.

Anyway, subtracting all the bullshit and stripping it down to well wishes and good will, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas. I didn't buy you anything but I hold some of you in my heart. If that's enough for you then I'll keep you there as long as you like. No charge.