I Hate the Christmas Season

The Con

I spend the last six weeks of every year in a much surlier mood the usual.  The Christmas season has a way of doing that to me.  Hordes of people on the streets, going nowhere; clogging up the sidewalks so it is impossible for the average New Yorker to get to work on time.  The cheery holiday music announcing the birth of a nice Jewish boy from Nazareth is everywhere and perfect strangers are being nice to each other because TV commercials say they should.

Honestly, it drives me to utter distraction.  I can’t stand all the faux feelings of niceness.  The only distractions I get are from the various holiday parties that find themselves at my bar after they eat.  If I get lucky, maybe one or two will get into a drunken pushing match and I get to throw them out.  Am I angry while it is going on?  Absolutely, but I am not so secretly getting off on it as well.  It is one of the few times that I get to see the true humanity of these people come out when they should be proclaiming the not so silent joys of brother/sisterhood.

This year, with Thanksgiving falling late, my calculations gave me a brief respite from the group ecstasy drop.  However, the first Christmas song I heard was on November 2 and it only got worse from there.  My ulcer acted up, I could barely sleep and it seemed everyone was looking for the Holiday pleasantness to overturn the horrible hangover from the beginning of the recession.  Of course, this only drove me further into despising the season.

So as the general populous turns to the Christmas Carole and the so-called ‘Holiday Season’ for comfort, I feel the need to explain my of the aforementioned.  Don’t worry; I haven’t done anything trite like list my twelve reasons to hate Christmas.  I was far more narcissistic and, perhaps, even insightful.

Personal:

The enforced frivolity, joviality and good well towards men garbage promulgated mostly through song, makes Club Med seem like a trip through the dark side of cynicism.  I do not dream of a white Christmas, nor will I be home for Christmas this year.  Frankly, unless Bob Seger is singing it, I hope the Little Drummer Boy breaks the skin on his drum and has to wait for the music store to re-open on January 5^th because they are on vacation.

Charitable:

You should be giving to charity, to charitable causes or volunteering to help someone somewhere, all through the year or so I am told.  Giving to the Salvation Army Santa’s on the street from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is nice but it won’t get you into heaven.  It won’t help with your prayers to G-d either.  In ’91, I gave lots of cash I didn’t have to every Sally Army Santa I could find in New York City, all the while begging G-d to help me keep my then girlfriend whom I wanted to marry.  She left me five months later.

Economic:

Who came up with the idea of wrapping every available phallic symbol in lights?  Note to the Bloomberg administration: we are in an economic crisis.  One that is so bad the Governor of New York has decided to raise taxes, decrease public services and, ironically, increase spending by 7.8%.  Here’s a thought: save the average consumer the cost of that January electric bill and treat the city like it’s in the middle of an air raid – lights out.

Religious:

The historical Jesus, known by his proper Hebrew name Joshua son of Joseph and Mary, was born sometime in late May or early June.  Jews went to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem twice a year, Shavuot (celebrated in the late spring) being the holiday when the entire family was required to be in the capitol for a census.  Why else would a man drag his wife, who was 9 months pregnant, 20 miles on horseback unless he was required to by law?

Also, Mary was no virgin.  She got herself knocked up by her boyfriend and they panicked.  Nazareth wasn’t quite the cosmopolitan town Jerusalem was at the time.  Herod had just made gambling legal in the Jewish capitol so he and his partners in Roman Empire could watch the skim closely. Joe and Mary had to think fast as to how this could have happened.  Let’s face it, the will of G-d must have played really well to their parents, especially after Mary gave birth to a boy.  What Jewish mother doesn’t think their son is G-d? 

Professional:

Christmas parties always seem to bring out the frisky in us all.  I know I have made out with women I have found attractive in full view of my co-workers many times over.  Like everyone else who has made the same drunken error after drinking way too many cups of the free egg nog, I have put up with the ball busting and goofing I deserved from my peers.

However, a new variant has been added in the past few years in the various joints I have worked: the bathroom quickie, usually meaning a pre-coitus stall blowjob.  It is usually up to the bartender to barge in and remind the amorous couple that the office party is in the restaurant, not the toilet stall.

Occasionally, this means breaking in just at the moment of truth, thereby giving the fellatee that glorious moment known as ‘the money shot’ in the porn industry.  And we all know how much women enjoy having seminal fluid all over the made up face and recently done hair.

Guys, we don’t want to see blowjobs done in a drunken amateur fashion and certainly don’t want to embarrass the participants into never coming into the place again.  Make out?  Cool.  Bathroom sex?  Take it to your apartment.

If it seems like those of us who feel the Grinch had it right are annoying those optimists out there, well, sorry.  Sometimes you just get so fed up with the enforced happiness of Thanksgiving to New Year’s that you just start reacting.  Although watching those we annoy get upset is part of the fun.  Juvenile?  Yes but still barrels of laughs.

There many people that feel the same way I do with some of us being a bit more loquacious about our dislikes.  For a primer of a Minnesotans derision of the season, check out James Henry’s excellent 1990 article in the New Republic, it hits on certain points I never thought of.

Seasons Greetings to you all.