Bah humbug!

It’s two days before Christmas and all through the house (condo) not a creature is stirring (except for the cat, Colbert). All that can be heard is that dreadful Michael Bublé Christmas album.

Yes, it’s Christmastime and that means it’s time for my annual Christmas grouse. And no, I’m not referring to the chicken-like bird.

The festive holiday seaon atmosphere [choose one: surrounds, ungulfs, suffocates] us all. Crowded stores, restaurants, and public places are elaborately decorated with wreaths and trees filled with ornaments and colorful lights. It’s beautiful.

People are doing all that they can to help our sputtering economy by logging on to retail websites and buying goodies in record numbers. They are braving the holiday crowds and venturing out to malls and shops to pick up gifts for friends and family. It’s generous.

The air is filled by inescapable, omnipresent Christmas music. It’s too much.

Sure, most people love Christmas music. I am not one of them. I remember when Christmas music on the radio, piped into stores and malls, and played in restaurants didn’t really start until immediately after Thanksgiving. That meant about four or five weeks of uninterrupted, interminable joy to the world.

Over the past few years, though, Halloween seems to have become the kick-off of the commercial Christmas season. Seriously, do we really need two full months of this constant reminder of Christmas?

And if my son doesn’t stop playing that goddam Michael Bublé Christmas album on the iPod speaker system in our small condo over and over again, I’m going to go ballistic! Enough already!

I am a Grinch

Okay, I admit it. I am a Grinch. Yes, I know that Christmas, the holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ, is an important and joyous holiday to Christians. I’m enough of a pragmatist to recognize that our nation, while not a “Christian Nation,” as some conservatives suggest, is a nation that is overwhelmingly Christian

And yet, year-after-year, there are those (e.g., everyone on Fox News) who insist that there is a “War on Christmas.”

Seriously, do most Christians really believe that small sliver of the American population comprised of atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other non-Christians have somehow stolen Christmas?

I look around and wonder how anyone can come to that conclusion. I hear continuous, unavoidable Christmas music; it’s virtually nonstop. I see Christmas shows and specials on TV, Christmas movies in theaters, Christmas musicals and plays on live stage.

Flyers and advertisements for Christmas sales add significant weight to the newspapers I stuff into my recycling bin each week. The bulk of TV commercials at this time of year are all about the Christmas gifts you absolutely must buy…like a Lexus adorned with a huge, red bow.

I see formerly vacant lots filled with Christmas trees and wreaths that are selling briskly. I see homes, condos, and apartments throughout the city decked out with colorful and blinking lights and fully adorned Christmas trees in the windows. I see nativity scenes on public squares and common areas around city and on town hall lawns throughout the area.

I see grown men wearing red suits, fake beards, and pillows stuffed under their belts, little kids sitting on their laps in stores and malls. At any other time of the year these men would be arrested.

But at Christmastime, there are long lines of parents, with their kids in tow, eager to put their little darlings onto the lap of some otherwise unemployable, probably drunk old man wearing a phony beard and dressed in a strange costume promising to bring them all kinds of gifts that their parents can’t really afford.

Can someone please explain to me how Christmas is being stolen?

Well, maybe the “Christmas spirit” has, in fact, been usurped by crass commercialism. Christmas has become less a religious holiday than a two-month long Washington’s Birthday Sale on steroids that drives people to extreme behaviors. Shoppers desperate for bargains are over-the-top competitive, pushing and shoving…even pepper spraying, tasing, or shooting…anyone who stands in the way of the doll, gadget, game, or toy they simply have to have.

Instead of the holidays bringing out the best in people, it seems that this season of good will and joy instead brings out the worst in many. Me included.

Bah humbug! Oh yeah. Happy Holidays.

Advertisement