A Small Christmas Rant  /  Alexander LaVake

Not to flash all Buh Humbug on everyone’s ass but I’m sorry, I really do not care for Christmas and the whole series of events that pile up this time of the year.  I mean, I do like fun, but where is the Holiday fun – or is fun to do all that shopping?  Or maybe it’s the wack-job family you get to visit with?  Those ten pounds you gain?

I don’t think I always felt this way and sometimes it seems the dislike grows just a little more each year.  Not to mention, the Christmas themed consumerism starts to trickle into our lives just a little sooner each year.  This past summer I saw some red and green in late August.

I grew up around a pretty traditional Catholic-Italian family and this time of year my interesting experiences were always exponential.  But it wasn’t all bad – being a little gay-boy, I sure did love decorating.  I started as early as Macy’s with the chachkas and twinkle lights. I had my own special box of “bedroom” decorations that was stored in the attic. I would change my screensaver.  Plus I was in charge of the whole outside situation – so I was lucky enough to spend a cold Sunday afternoon alone on the porch with strings of lights and extension cords and the 3-foot tall Santa and elves.  And, of course, I surely wasn’t opposed to making that “Wish List”.

But there was always something strange in the air – an extra level of stress or worry that seemed to come in with the cold weather.  All that planning and decorating and cooking and shopping seemed to fry everyone long before the big day.  The day the stress set in was always when my mother and I would decorate the tree.  As many times as I can remember, my step-father would get the tree cut and back to the house, the rest up to us.  My grandmother would be constantly interrupting and trying to feed us.

We would get a real tree every year, at my request – fake trees were the seed that planted my now growing plastic-Holiday distaste.  Every year my mother insisted that we would get a fake tree the following year.  She still hasn’t

My mother and I kept a very elaborate collection of ornaments and lights and always managed to create the most cluttered, clashing and oversized tree.  Some ornaments were my ugly preschool projects she refused to retire among other things dating back to Christmas’s she spent with my father before I was even born.

But it was the lights that brought an onset of anxiety each year.  We had a system of twinkle lights that didn’t require rocket science but somehow the two of us just couldn’t manage.  To get the lights around the tree all the way, we’d take turns feeding the lights with a yard stick to the other one who would be up on a step stool and usually smashed between the wall and the tree, being poked with needles in the face and neck.  Even younger, I knew this event would get a guaranteed “Fuck!” out of my mother.

After what would amount to a pretty lame yelling match and a couple more “fucks”, someone would walk off, sometimes crying and within a half hour, we would apologize and hug.  The routine got better when I was past the high school years and could yell “fuck” along with mom.  Not to mention, once I was of age, we could share a cigarette along with the Holiday cheer!

I suppose when I was younger that stressful air of Christmas didn’t faze me so much.  I got time off school and presents.  And to decorate!   So when did I notice that the whole thing is really a festival of Made In China crap?  My lack of religious interests doesn’t seem to be the problem – the whole ordeal pretty much lacks any religious interest in itself, unless your in the fraction of folks who go to church that one day a year. But, really, the whole birth of Jesus thing is mixed up with Santa Clause and candy canes and Hanukkah and the creation of “The Holidays” took over for Jesus a long time ago.

Maybe I do suffer from some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that acts up when the whole country converts itself into a plastic-electric-moving-North Pole.  It’s even worse in L.A., where fake snowman sit beneath palm trees.  Walgreens is full of those fuzzy, battery-operated bears, monkeys, and Santas – definitely made in China.  And oh boy is that some technology, getting those bears to wiggle and move their arms up and down while a synthesized Jingle Bell Rock blows out of their ass holes.

And this is nothing new.  My mom has a hand-me-down Mr. And Mrs. Clause and being probably 30 years old, I’m positive that they are the last of the American-made Christmas decorations.  They are big enough to resemble dressed up little-people and they do a very slow twist to the left, stop, then a slower twist to the right, raising the candle in their hand when somewhere in the middle.  Even though they plug into the wall they act as if their batteries are dying as they do their turn very slowly making a sad machine noise the entire time.  Eeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrr.  Click.  Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.  Click.

There is just too much of this shit.  So much that I’m still force feeding myself red and green M & M’s in March and before I know it it’s August and its happening all over again.  Once I heard about some awful thing called “Christmas in July” and I almost shit myself.  Lucky for me it never caught on.

And in December I deal pretty well by avoiding most malls and shopping centers, by skimping on the gift-giving (bless the internet!) and, though a struggle, just accepting the fact that I get to drink and eat more than usual.  Especially drink.  I can deal with that.

Perhaps it isn’t Christmas or The Holidays or even Jesus that bother me so much, perhaps it’s all the decorated-made-by-children-for-children-plastic-glowing-wiggling-singing-red-and-green-things that make me nuts, well stressed enough to need a cigarette after buying toothpaste at Walgreens this time of year.  I think next year I will be sure to have a good stock of hygiene products before the Holidays set in.  Also, soon, maybe I’ll buy my mom the fake tree.  Pre-lit.