That season is upon us again. The anonymous one. The one we dare not name, which is why we have to come up with code names for it.
One favourite is "the holidays." These days you can watch a commercial in which buddy uses his cool cellphone camera to send his wife pictures of stuff at the store with the message "This is what I want for the holidays."
The holidays? Does his wife e-mail him back with "What holiday is that, dear? Victoria Day? St. Swithin's Day? Bastille Day?"
"For the holidays"! You know, those of us who are self-employed don't get no stinking holidays. So that substitute is no use to us. For us "the holidays" are just one more time of the year when "employed" people get paid for doing nothing. So really, we in the self-employed community are grievously offended by the use of the term holidays.
So what term can we use? Another favourite is "the festive season." Oh, right. Putting a tree in your living room, festooning everything you can think of with lights, and helping to wipe out the turkey population are not festive. A better description is wacked out.
As is getting together with people you don't like very much to get drunk because it's December. Supposedly this is all an expression of that desire for peace on earth and goodwill towards men which is supposed to characterize the "festive season." Well, here's a notion – why not instead try to produce some peace on earth? Why not try to have some goodwill towards men? And women, too, of course, although even if we could just manage to have it towards men that would be a vast improvement.
And then there's Xmas, the coy name which gets close without revealing the horrible syllable Christ. You'd think Christ was a bad guy the way people try to avoid naming him every December. I mean, many of his followers are utterly vicious, sure, but Christ seems to have been a tolerable guy. His simple message that we're all jerks so why don't we just get off each other's cases occasionally would work wonders if anyone ever paid attention to it. Which they don't do at Christmas because they're too busy putting up trees in the living room and getting drunk with people they don't like very much.
Well, we don't want to offend people who don't celebrate Xmas, do we? Oh, no – that's why we cover everything in Xmas decorations and have Xmas sales and articles about Xmas entertaining in every publication and spend most of our waking hours hunting down Xmas presents and doing Xmas baking and Xmas decorating and covering the outsides of our houses in a few hundred square feet of Xmas lights. We wouldn't want to offend people by shoving our holiday in their faces, would we?
Of course, you wonder how we would offend them. I, a person of pallor, am not offended by Kwanzaa. I am not a religious person, but the doomed good intentions of the religious holidays I find quite charming. Xmas's failed ambitions are particularly poignant.
Despite that assurance you may conclude from what I've written here that I don't think highly of Xmas or the festive season or the holidays, but you could not be more wrong, or wronger. Xmas is the only day of the year on which you can take a third helping without arousing disapproval (it being the season of goodwill and all), which ranks fairly high on my scale of priorities. And people – most of them, anyway – do try to be nice. And the next day you can either go to the sales or go to the race track where you can catch a $43 win price on a horse named Garmor Hustler because everyone else in the crowd is honouring the festive season by hunch-betting a horse named Drinking and Dreaming. As I once did. Catch a big number, that is. On Boxing Day. At Western Fair Raceway – you could look it up.
Drinking and Dreaming! That wouldn't be a bad name for the season itself. And drinking and dreaming are the chief species of enjoyment that human life affords. I guess it would offend teetotallers like me, though, eh? And MADD.
But I have the solution.
Happy Dreaming!!
Ex-mas © Coolth, 2003
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