Merry Frickin’ Christmas

This is the last Christmas that I will be able to not like.

I am not a fan of Christmas. I haven’t been enamoured with Christmas for at least the last decade – possibly longer. It’s not like I’m actively wrecking people’s trees or stealing their presents but I just don’t see the point of all the mania.

It starts just after Hallowe’en (don’t get me started on that pseudo-holiday) with the Christmas-themed displays, insipid music, stupid jingles and the increasingly-noxious marketing. The circus gains momentum the closer it gets to American Thanksgiving, then for the final month before Christmas day it’s nothing but a mad rush with frantic “news” reports about sales volumes, semi-comic tragedies about people who just can’t buy that perfect item, and borderline psychotic crowds jamming the stores like lemmings searching for a cliff to be swept over.

I hate it all.

If you’ve been brought up in a Christian society, then you more than likely are aware of the “true” meaning of Christmas: that some guy who is said to be the Son of God was born to working-class parents in desperate circumstances. The birth of this child was the start of the salvation of those who believed. Christmas was a celebration of the believers’ deliverance from damnation. The tradition of gift-giving was to remind us of the gifts of the Wise Guys who recognized the signs and honored the newborn with rare and valuable offerings. And a new era of humanity ensued.

That, if anything, is supposed to be what Christmas is about. However our vacuous society has turned it into nothing more than a panicked rush to consume and out-do others. The creation of Santa Claus in the 1930s by the Coca-Cola Company was pure marketing, stealing and perverting the Dutch Sinterklaas fable and turning into the monsterous thing it is today. What this has to do with Christ’s birthday is beyond me.

So what am I to do since The Kid is due in a few short weeks? Sooner or later (later please) little baby Peach is going to grow up and be thrust into this farce of a holiday, and I’m going to have to either give in and embrace the horror, or fight against it and be the bad Dad.

All I know is that I’m going to teach baby Peach that Christmas should not be about getting presents and unbridled consumption but the celebration of friends and family. To spend time with those we love and cherish and have some fun at the same time. Presents and the whole commercial hub-bub will not go away but at least I won’t be adding to the madness.

So, having vented all this I still wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Just not a commercial one.