December 17th – Christmas Themed Christmas Gifts

Okay, so I already talked ad nauseum about how awful Christmas clothing is,  but what’s even worse than that is receiving it as a gift. In fact any gift that’s holiday themed is pointless and kind of a waste of money because the person receiving the gift has to wait almost an entire year for it to be relevant. Oh sure, if you get it a few days early you have enough time to wear the “Ho Ho Ho” sweatshirt your clueless aunt bedazzled for you, but then its just boxed away and forgotten.

Now, there’s been few of these entries where I’ve been able to say I’m a culprit, but when it comes to giving gifts like these I’m guilty as charged — or at least I used to be. My mom used to be one of those people who had a Christmas Village on display, so each year the “safety” gift to get her, the one I KNEW she’d like, was another light-up ceramic  building for her seasonal suburb.

In my defense, however, this was the little kid equivalent of buying my mom a toy and they say most people buy gifts that they’d actually like to receive. It wasn’t my fault all the stuff she wanted was feminine and grown-up. But getting her a new police station for the village was something akin to giving her the Ninja Turtles Sewer Playset or the X-Men’s Danger Room.

These days the village stays boxed up in the basement having grown too large after years of receiving new pieces from me and my brother.  Likewise, my mother’s basement is filled to the brim with other unused holiday junk. That’s because every year my mom and her umpteen sisters and sister-in-laws all exchange Christmas bullshit with each other and so there are just boxes and boxes of unused  snowmen candle holders, Santa serving trays and other brik-a-brak that she’s completely forgotten about.

But who could blame her? Getting some new Christmas merchandise on December 24th is a guarantee of another eleven months of box time before any use can come of it. This summer, the holiday table at our garage sale was the biggest one and there’s still even more junk taking up space in the basement.

From now on, I think I’ll start giving all my relatives presents for 4th of July instead of useless Christmas junk.  That way the wait time until the item is actually useful would be cut in half.

December 16th – Modernized Santa

Christmas is an old-fashioned holiday. The food is old-fashioned, the songs are all old-fashioned and even most of its traditions are old-fashioned, including the holiday’s official mascot Santa Claus.  So its no surprise that in order to reach a more modern generation, companies try to depict St. Nick as being a “cool guy” who wears sunglasses and jams out with a Jimmy Buffet cover band on the weekends.

The only problem with this is that whenever you try to make an old person “cool” and “hip” it always makes them look even more like a doddering old fool. Like they’re so confused from not taking their Alzheimer’s medication that they think they’re teenagers again. Nothing could be less cool than trying to make an old person cool.

Considering the legend of Santa Claus goes back to ancient times, he’s just about the oldest old person around. That also means that the more you try to modernize him, the cornier it ends up being in practice. Of course, you try telling that the the five hundred different companies who think they’re the first one to feature a Santa in sunglasses rocking out on the beach in their commercials.

Santa Claus doesn’t NEED to be modernized and all attempts to do it just ruin the “magic” of the holiday. Like when you start having Santa use a GPS to get around to all the Christ-worshipping children in the world instead of the standard holiday magic, it’s almost as if what’s being said is that holiday magic must be bought at the store (and can be returned for store credit within 30 days if you have your receipt.)

Santa is above all of that shit. I don’t want to see him listening to an iPod while he bumps and grinds in his tricked out sleigh with hydrolics while he Twitters about how much he loves the new Call of Duty for X-Box 360.  All he needs is milk, cookies, some elf slaves, flying reindeer and a little thing called holiday cheer. That’s all! Stop trying to pervert him with all these images that are supposed to make him hip and edgy for today’s web-savvy youth.

Can’t these companies realize that some things are just timeless and that Santa Claus is one of them?

December 15th – Little Saint Nick

Maybe it’s just the fact that wailing, high-pitched harmonizing is no longer considered cool but I could never get into the Beach Boys.  And did anyone else find it weird that they were always guest starring on Full House? I mean, I know Uncle Jesse played drums for them but how far do we have to suspend disbelief to accept that this huge band is hanging out in the suburbs with this dorky family all the time, making music in the basement? These guys live in mansions and probably have their own recording studios!

But I digress, we’re not here to talk about the antics of the Tanner family, we’re here to talk about another song I freaking hate around this time of year. “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys is an excercise in holiday themed torture.

First of all, have the Beach Boys ever even SEEN a depiction of Santa Claus? Little is not the right word to describe him.  Portly, chubby, obese, these are all much better terms.  That alone shows you just how much work was put into this song (very little.) The lyrics are just dreadful.

Take the chorus of the song, where the Beach Boys are singing “Merry Christmas Santa” but it sounds an awful lot like “Merry Christmas Satan.” How redundant is it to even wish Santa a Merry Christmas? That’s like wishing for the sun to stay warm.

This little ditty is followed up with a super low bass filled “Christmas comes this time each year.” Obvious much? Yes, Christmas DOES come this time each year because it’s fucking Christmas time! That’s just such an unneccesary observation and it’s like, for some reason, the goddamn hook of this song. The Beach Boys later went on to write such hits as “People in love are sure in love” and “Friday night comes after Thursday.”

The worst thing about this song is that it is EVERYWHERE this time of year and since there’s pretty much no popular covers of the song, it’s always the exact same three minutes and twelve seconds of torture no matter where you hear it. You hear it in the stores, on the radio, waiting in the dentist’s office, at work, on TV, in movies, on commercials, coming out of hidden speakers in the bushes of your backyard, replacing sirens for emergency vehicles and when the moon is full in December, you can faintly hear it playing this song.

December 14th – Fake Snow

You know what sucks? Snow.

You know what’s even worse than snow? Fake snow.

No matter which way you slice it, no matter what brand of fake snow you get, it always ends up being the most toxic substance you can bring into your house and what’s even worse is the fact that it almost NEVER looks like the real thing.

There’s a few different varieties of fake snow out there, each one more horrible than the last. You have your garden-variety cotton fluff which is actually just leftover fake spiderwebs from Halloween.  Sure it’s white, but it doesn’t look a thing like snow either. It looks like a big ball of white pubic hair.

Then there’s the plastic flake kind of fake snow, the kind where it looks like someone took a bunch of grocery bags and shred them into tiny pieces.  This stuff looks a little more like the real thing, but only if you’re looking at it from a distance and you’re wearing someone else’s prescription glasses and you’re drunk. The problem with this stuff is that it looks like trash– literally! It looks like someone just dumped out a wastebasket onto your precious Christmas village.  Because you see, real snow clumps together while this plastic stuff just sits in a collective mass, with each fake flake visible. For some reason too, I can’t help but think it looks like dandruff when I see this stuff.

I can’t even begin to fathom the spray-on snow. I’ve never really come face to face with it and I hope I never do because it creeps me out. I mean at this point you’re literally spraying chemicals all over your house, how is that supposed to be festive? Spray-on snow lets you decorate your windows so that even if it’s an unseasonable sixty-eight degrees outside you can still write holiday sayings like “Hope” and “Joy” or stencil in a snowflake or snowman design that looks like some graphetti artist came by and tagged your house for the holidays.

Since science is out of control now, I’ve seen fake real snow in the stores now. These are mostly just for people who have lived on the equator their entire lives and have never seen the real stuff. You mix some packet of chemicals in water and stir, after a few minutes you have slush. This stuff is technically the real deal because you’re using real water to turn it into real whatever, but can I just say it creeps me the fuck out? And then when you’ve got this stupid can of snow, what are you supposed to do with it? Is it safe to even use or touch? If you get it in your eye, will you go blind?

Yes, yes you will.

December 13th – Get a job, Mrs. Claus!

Who the hell is Mrs. Claus?

I mean, sure, we’ve all got our theories, but who is she really?

Santa Claus we know as plain as day. There’s really not much dispute in the mythos of Santa anymore. His wife, on the other hand, nobody really knows what she does or who she is. In fact, she’s not even given a name! She’s just “Mrs.” to his Mr. like some fucked up subsurviant who is just there to please him.

Someone needs to let Mrs. Claus know it’s 2009 and all the ladies are independent now. Unless she already got the memo and is just milking Santa for the benefits like some ancient gold digger.  We need to shake up the north pole and make Mrs. Claus get a job. She needs to be a role model for today’s young women, not just some housewife married to a guy who only works one day out of the year. I mean, it’s not like she even has kids or anything.

The only explanation that really makes sense is that Santa is really gay and the Mrs. is just his beard.  That’s why they never had kids, it’s because Santa’s actually banging the totally queer elves on the side. Mrs. Claus is there to take suspicion away from him. I mean, of course you can’t have a gay Santa. An old guy dressed in red that asks kids to sit on his lap and then breaks into their house to leave them presents is apparently only not-creepy if he’s straight. As long as he’s going home to bang Mrs. Claus, nobody raises an eyebrow. As if somehow he couldn’t be a child molester because she would put a stop to it or something.

Santa Claus is iconic, Mrs. Claus not so much. Most depictions of her make her some twisted female clone of Santa, like she was created in a lab to be his perfect twin. In recent years there’s been a lot of sexy young Mrs. Claus’s running around, which I think is like ten hundred percent grosser. I mean just because Mrs. Claus serves no purpose but to be a sexual plaything of her child obsessed husband doesn’t mean we need to depict her as some sort of porno whore.

December 12th – Nutcrackers

One thing I REALLY can’t understand about this holiday season is the tradition where people allow a demon spawn from the very bowels of Hell to come into their homes. You may know them by their common name, nutcrackers, but make no mistake, it’s not nuts these guys crave, it’s the suffering of humans. And what a better time to feed off of the misery of the human race then during the highly depressive, insanely stressful holiday season? These little minions of Satan fill their bellies with our agony and then hibernate unsuspectingly with the rest of the holiday decorations until they can come back out to feast once more.

Seriously though, why are they so creepy? WHY? What’s the deal with the exposed tooth and gum line? Why do all nutcrackers look like they had their top lips ripped off and how is this supposed to be considered festive? If it’s not those managled chompers, it’s the bulbous eyes and inappropriately rosy cheeks that are supposed to make the thing look innocent and cutesy but only serves to increase the overall terrifying effect a thousand fold. Some of the more elaborate nutcrackers can be seen holding things like swords, spears and other weapons.  Is that really a good idea, to give something that looks so downright spooky a weapon?

I think I would be able to tolerate them a little better if they actually served a purpose. Oh sure, they’re designed to crack nuts, but when was the last time you ever used one for that purpose? Most people just use those metal prong do-hickeys that get the job done much better.  Every time I’ve come face-to-terrifying-face with a holiday nutcracker it’s there as decoration only and there’s a strict “do not touch” vibe around it.

Which is unfortunate because actually using a nutcracker is the only way to deplete it’s power over you. Each nut you crack in its evil jaws frees up a bit of your soul that it had stolen from you. The real ruse of the nutcracker was getting us to take it in as decorum only.

And honestly, it’s kind of our fault, because who wants to just look at a nutcracker?

They’re ugly, horrible monsters!

December 11th – A Very Special Christmas Episode

It’s all over folks. By this point most of the shows I watch on TV are done, gone into TV hibernation for the holiday season until next year. What will my Thursday nights be like without a smattering of 30 Rock, The Office and Parks and Recreation?

Of course, as tradition dictates, these shows all had their very special Christmas episodes to leave us hanging with until the shows return in mid-January.  Christmas episodes can be great, don’t get me wrong, but they always leave me kind of feeling naseous.  Everything gets kind of dropped in lieu of celebrating the season and something always feels a little off because of it. Big storyline developments are interwoven into the episodes making it seem like these shows take place in a universe where things only happen at Christmas time and right before the summer.

The problem I have with Christmas episodes is that they’re only fun to watch at Christmas time. When you watch the same episode in June (on DVD of course, since reruns no longer exist outside of syndication) it’s always got a little too much Christmas cheese on it.  Sure the episodes are still funny or dramatic or whatever you want them to be, but then you’ve got all this snow and presents and someone singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and it just makes you want to gag.

Saturday Night Live got it right by having one Christmas themed episode a season and then taking the best skits from that and incorporating it into a holiday special each year. You only see the Christmas stuff again when it’s appropriate and it makes it feel more, well not to be redundent, but special.

Weirdly enough, Secret Santa was the theme of two shows I watched last night, which was also the Advent Calendar entry of the day yesterday. And that, inevitably, is the true folly of the Christmas themed episode; the fact that holiday humor has a very narrow spectrum.

You can only make so many fruitcake jokes.

December 10th – Secret Santa

Coming in off of yesterday’s economic rant, here’s another tradition that was made up to make sure you end up spending every scrap of money you have this holiday season. The whole idea behind a Secret Santa gift exchange is innocent enough, in fact it’s almost downright noble, but in practice it never works.

First of all, Secret Santa is usually carried on in places where people are only slightly familiar with one another, places like work and school. If you’re doing it with a group of actual friends or family, I’ve noticed it’s customary to call it “drawing names” and not “Secret Santa.” And that’s because society has recognized that there is a distinct difference between the two.  One is a custom of buying a gift for a randomly chosen person while recieving a gift from another randomly chosen person while the other is Secret Santa.

In Secret Santa you never get anything you want, need or really care for. Often times Secret Santa gifts are joke or gag items because the person giving them doesn’t know you well enough to be sincere. And Secret Santa gifts are always always always the most awkward things to both give and get. Everyone has on their best poker face, trying to stay cordial and genuine while unwrapping useless items.

It’s even worse to have to get a gift for someone. There is some ancient Christmas black magic that is cast over any set of Secret Santa names that guarantees you will always get the one person you’ve barely even spoken to. Then there’s always some sort of price cap and depending on how low it is, it can be downright impossible to find something of any value.

This is when you start resorting to the generic gift ideas like food, gift certificates, stocking stuffer doodads and gift sets of booze. I’m pretty sure Secret Santa was actually invented by the stores that hawk this shit so that they can move it out before they roll out the Valentine’s Day garbage.

Whenever there’s an option to decline a Secret Santa, I take it. It’s not that I don’t like giving gifts or recieving them, but I save that pleasure for the people I actually know and care about. When I give a gift I want it to be something the person actually likes, not something that ends up just being shoved in a closet and sold in a garage sale come spring.

December 9th – Christmas Debt

Today I had the lovely experience of discovering that my cell phone’s service has been shut off until I pay my late balance which I think makes today’s entry so much more pertinent.  You know who hates the holidays even more than me? My checking account.

If I see one more goddamn Christmas special where the main characters discover that the joy of the holidays comes from love and family and all sorts of intangible feel-goodies I’m going to vomit blood all over my television screen. That’s all nice for TV land but it doesn’t really translate well into real life. You can’t wrap up goodwill and peace and stick it under a Christmas tree.

Although part of me wants to just try that. I could give all of my loved ones wrapped boxes that are empty and when they open it I can go “that’s filled with my love.” All they’re gonna think is that I’m just a cheap ass who can’t afford real presents. And the truth is that’s exactly it!

I’ve got no money for Christmas presents this year thanks to this roarin’ recession and the fact that I’m still trying to pay off my debt from last year.  Every December it’s always the same thing, your money just goes every which way except for where it needs to be.  You can’t just not pay your bills but if you do, you don’t have any money for presents.

The whole tradition of exchanging gifts just really makes the season have an entire damper. You get one day out of the whole month where you get all this shit from people, but spend the rest of the time ignoring debt collectors and scrounging up change (which will then just end up in some Goodwill bucket anyway– but that’s a different rant.)

It’s shitty. This is supposed to be Jesus’s Pagan birthday celebration or whatever. It’s supposed to be some time for miracles. So why is it that I can’t tell the guys who shut my phone off that and get to make calls the rest of the month? Or why can’t I just pay my bill off and say “fuck Christmas” this year?

What’s the point of a holiday that’s traditions force you to buy and consume to the point of complete misery? And how can you even get off calling it a religious holiday when it’s such a blatant celebration of gluttony?

December 8th – Christmas Clothing

I’m not a fashion guru, I don’t follow trends and for the most part my mom buys me a majority of my clothes– but I can still tell when something is tacky.  All Christmas clothing is tacky whether it’s a pair of Christmas tree socks, some Christmas light earrings or the dreaded Christmas sweater.

Why do people wear these things? We get it, it’s Christmas, I don’t need to look at your shirt to be reminded.  If these people were wearing them out of a need to camoflague themselves with the decorations, like if they were spies or assassins or something, then it’d be cool. But guess what, they’re not! They’re just kids, moms and old people!

I want to sit here and say “What’s the point of buying clothing that you can only wear one month out of the year?” but really, is that even stopping anyone anymore? The people who wear these tacky outfits are tacky people who don’t seem to care that its a fashion faux pas to even be wearing a sweater with an embroidered Santa Claus on it, let alone the fact that it’s February.

Maybe one day some high-end designer will get into the Christmas spirit and design some trendy, stylish outfits that incorporate imagery of the season and we’ll all go through a weird phase as a society where we’re always wearing Santa hats and light up sweatshirts.  But even then we’ll probably look back ten years later and be all like “Look at the tacky clothes we used to wear!”