I was already nearly exhausted with Christmas just two days after Thanksgiving. Black Friday is always very tiring for me, as I usually spend it lying around the house feeling guilty for not being out there throwing elbows for bargains at the mall. I missed out on my opportunity to be pepper-sprayed this year. Black Friday was followed, for me, by So What Saturday and Scratch Your Head Sunday. Then I missed Cyber Monday because I'm not sure how to get there.
I've got nothing done, and Christmas is only twenty-three shopping days away. The mall is open now, but I'm not going. This is because I have a morbid hatred of Christmas music.
I don't hate all Christmas songs. I don't mind the carols. They're pretty, and they remind me of my youth, when they were practically the only Christmas songs we had. They're all religious, though, and while I am not, they don't offend me. At least they don't offend me nearly as much as the awful versions of Rudolph and White Christmas and Frosty that are piped into every sandwich shop and CVS drugstore in the country. These songs are either sung with syrupy sweetness by a Mormon Tabernacle Choir-like massed chorus, or covered by some fading pop star who, imbued with the spirit of the season, quits shooting heroin and beating his mistress long enough to lay down some tracks on "Santa Claus Lane." In either case, I look at the freshly-scrubbed seasonal workers who are selling me my bows and wrapping paper and wonder how they can listen to the store's Muzak all day without being pumped full of PCP.
Staying home has its own hazards, though. They're called Christmas specials. Every single one that has ever been made gets replayed every year, and they make a couple fresh ones, too. Charlie Brown, Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rudolph dash through the snow in animation, claymation, hand puppets, marionettes, live action and digitalization everywhere on the remote. You can't hit the button without seeing Peppermint Patty or Tim Allen spouting some Christmas treacle. Even the ones featuring my personal seasonal heroes, Scrooge and the Grinch, have endings that ultimately disappoint.
For others who have reached their Christmas special breaking point, a news flash of good cheer: THE KARDASHIANS WILL NOT HAVE A CHRISTMAS SPECIAL THIS YEAR! Yes, after skipping out on her two month plus a long weekend marriage to roundball pro Kris Humphries, Kim Kardashian, the hefty-chested heart and soul of the Kardashian empire, does not feel up to standing under the mistletoe. Theories as to why the Kardashian-Humphries union failed abound, the most prominent being that it was a ratings gimmick in the first place, but in a spirit of compassion, let's consider alternatives. First, it was rumored that Kris refused to change his last name to Kardashian, or even Kumphries, thus threatening the iconic "K" that all the world has come to associate with spoiled, surgically enhanced moody white women. And of course it's always a bad idea to marry someone who's nineteen inches taller than you. Whenever you want to look at the sky, you see your partner's armpit instead.
The ideal height differential for a relationship is six inches, which happens to be the difference in inches between my height and my Significant Other's, which is why we have such a blissful life together. That, plus I do everything she wants me to do the minute she asks. It's the only way to make an American woman happy. If you are trying anything else, I advise you to quit wasting your time.
The lack of a Kardashian Christmas episode means that, for this year at least, the two worst products of the American television industry, Christmas specials and reality TV shows, will not be combined into some bottom-feeding, sweeps week seeking broadcast monstrosity. The popularity of reality TV rests on the fact that people on reality TV shows, who are always good-looking and sometimes even wealthy and famous do things that are so stupid that an inbred hillbilly woman living in a trailer park in tornado country, underneath a leaky dam on a major fault line, with one hand on a crack pipe and the other on the groin of the most recent man with whom she has had unprotected sex, a second cousin who showed up at her door wearing an orange jumpsuit and covered with prison tattoos, can glance up at her TV and say with an air of superiority, "Them people just has no common sense."
So the Kardashian-free Christmas is just for this year. Next year, to celebrate the season, Kim may well decide to have herself filmed having a baby in a stable.
It sometimes seems the entire Christmas season/spectacle/business cycle, a mothership of bloated commercialism trailing black tentacles of seasonal depression and potential bankruptcy, is designed to make us grateful when the calendar finally turns to bleak January, when we have nothing to look forward to except discarding some hastily-made resolutions and paying income tax.
And now I see that two youths have been arrested for setting off "deer bombs," packets of chemicals that smell exactly like deer urine, in a Walmart dressing room. Why, you ask, why, did these juveniles choose to celebrate Christmas by soaking their neighbors' clothes in deer wiz?
The answer, my friends, is that they are too young to buy pepper spray.
I've got nothing done, and Christmas is only twenty-three shopping days away. The mall is open now, but I'm not going. This is because I have a morbid hatred of Christmas music.
I don't hate all Christmas songs. I don't mind the carols. They're pretty, and they remind me of my youth, when they were practically the only Christmas songs we had. They're all religious, though, and while I am not, they don't offend me. At least they don't offend me nearly as much as the awful versions of Rudolph and White Christmas and Frosty that are piped into every sandwich shop and CVS drugstore in the country. These songs are either sung with syrupy sweetness by a Mormon Tabernacle Choir-like massed chorus, or covered by some fading pop star who, imbued with the spirit of the season, quits shooting heroin and beating his mistress long enough to lay down some tracks on "Santa Claus Lane." In either case, I look at the freshly-scrubbed seasonal workers who are selling me my bows and wrapping paper and wonder how they can listen to the store's Muzak all day without being pumped full of PCP.
Staying home has its own hazards, though. They're called Christmas specials. Every single one that has ever been made gets replayed every year, and they make a couple fresh ones, too. Charlie Brown, Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rudolph dash through the snow in animation, claymation, hand puppets, marionettes, live action and digitalization everywhere on the remote. You can't hit the button without seeing Peppermint Patty or Tim Allen spouting some Christmas treacle. Even the ones featuring my personal seasonal heroes, Scrooge and the Grinch, have endings that ultimately disappoint.
For others who have reached their Christmas special breaking point, a news flash of good cheer: THE KARDASHIANS WILL NOT HAVE A CHRISTMAS SPECIAL THIS YEAR! Yes, after skipping out on her two month plus a long weekend marriage to roundball pro Kris Humphries, Kim Kardashian, the hefty-chested heart and soul of the Kardashian empire, does not feel up to standing under the mistletoe. Theories as to why the Kardashian-Humphries union failed abound, the most prominent being that it was a ratings gimmick in the first place, but in a spirit of compassion, let's consider alternatives. First, it was rumored that Kris refused to change his last name to Kardashian, or even Kumphries, thus threatening the iconic "K" that all the world has come to associate with spoiled, surgically enhanced moody white women. And of course it's always a bad idea to marry someone who's nineteen inches taller than you. Whenever you want to look at the sky, you see your partner's armpit instead.
The ideal height differential for a relationship is six inches, which happens to be the difference in inches between my height and my Significant Other's, which is why we have such a blissful life together. That, plus I do everything she wants me to do the minute she asks. It's the only way to make an American woman happy. If you are trying anything else, I advise you to quit wasting your time.
The lack of a Kardashian Christmas episode means that, for this year at least, the two worst products of the American television industry, Christmas specials and reality TV shows, will not be combined into some bottom-feeding, sweeps week seeking broadcast monstrosity. The popularity of reality TV rests on the fact that people on reality TV shows, who are always good-looking and sometimes even wealthy and famous do things that are so stupid that an inbred hillbilly woman living in a trailer park in tornado country, underneath a leaky dam on a major fault line, with one hand on a crack pipe and the other on the groin of the most recent man with whom she has had unprotected sex, a second cousin who showed up at her door wearing an orange jumpsuit and covered with prison tattoos, can glance up at her TV and say with an air of superiority, "Them people just has no common sense."
So the Kardashian-free Christmas is just for this year. Next year, to celebrate the season, Kim may well decide to have herself filmed having a baby in a stable.
It sometimes seems the entire Christmas season/spectacle/business cycle, a mothership of bloated commercialism trailing black tentacles of seasonal depression and potential bankruptcy, is designed to make us grateful when the calendar finally turns to bleak January, when we have nothing to look forward to except discarding some hastily-made resolutions and paying income tax.
And now I see that two youths have been arrested for setting off "deer bombs," packets of chemicals that smell exactly like deer urine, in a Walmart dressing room. Why, you ask, why, did these juveniles choose to celebrate Christmas by soaking their neighbors' clothes in deer wiz?
The answer, my friends, is that they are too young to buy pepper spray.
RSS Feed
