The Man Who Wouldn't Celebrate Christmas
So, basically, what we have with Christmas, our big national holiday we are so desperate to protect from the Terrorists! et al, is a Judeo-Christian society totally geared to shop until it drops, which it does right up to the Big Day when we all take a breather to gorge ourselves on turkey and plum pudding, before returning to the malls on Boxing Day to start all over again.
I say we extend the Statutoriness of the Holiday Season to December. That'll confound the Terrorists! et al.
Because Christmas is a lot like Judgement Day, isn't it. We're all supposed to strive for the Christmas that doesn't exist because it's supposed to be meaningful when in fact it's just Big and Stupid. A great big stupid stuck at the end of the year, every year of our lives, forever and ever and a day, until the crabby hand of death slaps us dead.
But does it really have to be like that, Dear Reader?
I worked with a guy who decided one year he was just going to ignore Christmas. We bugged the crap out of him for it, too. "You mean you're just going to be a big ol' Scrooge?! Bah, humbug and all that?! A selfish ungrateful bastard who doesn't celebrate Christmas anymore just because he hates it?!"
But he stuck to his guns and now lives a Christmas-free life. He has kids, too. And he's divorced. But he finally decided he was tired of feeling bad and stressed out because of an annual and seemingly inescapable holiday that brought him no joy or satisfaction and so he just completely opted out of it all and took our protestations under advisement and shut his office door.
For years afterward he would still get presents from rellies who wouldn't take no for an answer, too. For all I know, he still does. He even told us at work about how his siblings would complain to him in annual phone calls from around the world about how much money they'd spent on his gift and how hard it was to find him just the right thing and here he was not even bothering to return the favour. Eventually, he took on a kind of mythical status because of his refusal to do what everybody wanted him to do - which was to participate in Christmas. It became what defined him. "Don't bother asking him to do it - he doesn't even celebrate Christmas. Even his own kids can't guilt him into celebrating it. He's a stone. Ask somebody else."
Anyway, I get a vicarious thrill every time I think of him working up until the holidays and then saying, "Enjoy your time off. I know I will. See you in the New Year." It was just so lone wolf of him, so manly, so something I would never in a million years have the balls to do but wish everyone else did so it would cease to be such an annual emotional vortex and I could enjoy life without any rude interruptions like Christmas.
Because that's what Christmas is for so many of us - just an annual emotional and consuming vortex we get spun through and spat out the other side of into the New Year. An annual Judgement Day. A great big, stupid annual Judgement Day that serves absolutely no purpose other than to perpetuate the myth that we've got something the Terrorists! et all want.
Gawd. We should be so lucky.
