I hate Christmas for almost every reason a person can hate Christmas. I hate the nostalgia. I hate the pageantry. I hate the gift-giving—that it’s socially obligatory, that I suck at it, that you have to pretend “that’s exactly what I wanted!” I hate the cold. I hate inane rhymes like “reason for the season.” I hate the color scheme.
I hate gift-wrapping because everyone else can do it except for me. I hate hearing about Christian persecution in America (“season’s greetings” to you, my Pharisaical friend). I hate rehashing the Christmas story. I even hate nativity scenes. I hate the mess Christmas trees make and I hate the creepiness of fake trees. I hate that there’s ice on my car windshield and Christmas expects me to be happy about that.
No. I won’t.
And do you know what’s really wrong with Christmas?
Christmas music. The same damn songs every damn year. The same inane lyrics, moronic rhymes, and musical celebrations surrounding cultural icons we’ve created for the purpose of singing songs about them so as to force people to feel joyful during the most freezing, dark, and depressing time of year: winter.
Semi-famous people caterwaul their ecstasy about “the most wonderful time of the year” on one hand and croon about the weather outside being “frightful” on the other. A morass of meaningless, manufactured, masochistic sentimentality (because there’s no such thing as too much alliteration in a Christmas song! Needs more m’s!). Worse, actual musicians get suckered into the seasons and waste years of talent and craft on holding out a chorus about the beauty of precipitation and sleigh bells and bluebirds. “Let it snow” and watch Grandma get run over by a reindeer because Deck the Halls and Fa-La-La aren’t we so happy about bells that jingle and lights that twinkle—never mind the fact that they’ve been doing so since the 1800s.
O Christmas Tree! O Dear Sweet Christmas Tree of the many pine needles, whom we all ignored eleven and a half months of the year but for whom we have so much love that we have to chop down and murder and mount in the living room opposite the fireplace in case you fall over and make a huge mess on the carpet. How steadfast are your branches? Tell me. Because otherwise I’m just going to burn them in the fireplace so my cat can’t swat them off.
Ring-a-ling, silver bells. “Children laughing” and “people meeting smile after smile? In the city?” I assume you mean Denver because no one without a serious amount of weed in their system smiles at strangers during the Christmas shopping cluster. Keep ring-a-linging and someone is going to throw a brick at you. Me. I am going to throw a brick at you, so you and Bing Crosby will stop waxing poetic about one of the most vapid sounds this earth has been forced to experience.
Fourteen more days until Christmas.
Elaine Schnabel (’11) spent her twenties traveling, blogging, and earning various master’s degrees. Now earning her PhD at the University of North Carolina in organizational communication, Elaine researches and writes at the intersection of religion and communication. You can find her blogging at Religious (Not Crazy).
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Come to Tanzania. None of that. Just church on Christmas Day and a goat roast and some swimming pool time cuz this is hottest time of the year. The end.
Be careful the invitations you make. Sanna can tell you – I’ll just show up on your doorstep once I get sick of grad school . . .
#hottake alert!
Nard,
Is that an open invitation?
Karibu 🙂
Hahaha and I just noticed the tag “Hate.” Made me laugh all over again. Ah I miss my English major people.
I would describe this in the same way our English 360 volume describes the essay by Hazlitt: here we have a “classic of spleen.” Love it!
Elaine! You are going to just LOVE my post tomorrow.