Merry *&%$#ing Christmas!

I've been planning this blog for over a week.  Therefore naturally, as I sit down to write it, nothing is flowing easily.  That's what she said.

I'll be the first to admit; I'm a particular guy and a lot of things seem to piss me off.  Abnormally so, and with the help of good-hearted and patient people around me, I work to calm myself down.  I'll blame it on Italian.  In particular this season, it has been the hubbub surrounding the "reason for the season", Jesus vs. Gifty gifts, commercialism as a bad thing, and the like.

Allow me to lay some ground work.  I think a lot of current commercial notions and promotions of Christmas would make Jesus roll over in his grave...  I can't stand nearly all modern Christmas music, I want to punch stores collectively in the face for over a month of steady Red and Green barrage, and yes, you Black Friday bargain hunters are both thrifty and absolutely out of your damn minds.  To boot, I am what Christians would recognize as an apostate, which tends to make loving some of my favorite Christmas (read: worship) songs a little awkward.

Alas, I am what I am, and to get to my point in the fourth paragraph (Mr. Paynter would be so disappointed), year in and year out, Christmas is the single best and most important day in American culture.  Or at least my little slice of it.

Zealous Christian types, before you get your hopes up about this post, allow me to reaffirm that it is despite your efforts to ruin my holiday that I enjoy, neigh thrive on its existence.  And for general audiences, without diving too deeply into historical roots of this winter holiday, pagan ties, church agendas, etc., allow me for the purposes of this blog to dismiss them as irrelevant.  This blog is about how Christmas affects my family and I.  How it affects my culture.  How it perhaps affects you.

Oh my gorsh, this is such a complex topic.  Let me keep it down to anger and joy.  Anger that church would use it as piggy back marketing*, as an excuse to segregate themselves by defining themselves as Jesus focused while us degenerates focus on presents, as...  well, these things tend to sound better in threes, but I appeared to have wrapped it up in my second point.  Joy.  Joy in spending a month hunting for the best way to use my little budget to put the biggest smiles possible on the faces of those closest to me.  Joy, in knowing that for a day, most people are outward focused, excited more about the happiness they bring to others than the happiness they will receive themselves.  Joy that society will behave in a bit more of a civil manner (i.e. I will not cuss and gesture towards drivers whose heads can be found in their very asses.)  Joy in knowing that this year I get to spend Christmas morning with my children, who slept lightly in the next room waiting for Santa.  Joy that my Dad would give so much to see the faces of my brother and I as we open up our matching Eddie Van Halen signature guitars.  Joy that my Mom would go completely overboard on food and presents so that every last person in her house knew, scratch that, felt, owned, imbibed, lived that it was Christmas that day.

Listen, I know I'm coming off as grumpy with a lot of what I've written, but it's because my Facebook news feed is pissing in my Wheaties.  It's because people are actually confused as to weather they can say Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas.  It's because I want my favorite day back.  Christmas is C7 painted colored glass bulbs illuminating the room as I steal a kiss from my woman.  Not sleeping the night before and waking up at 3:30 to get shit started.  It's about lying for a month, then spending all day Christmas telling people how you lied to them in order to maintain the surprise of their gifts.  It's about family, it's about the best in people, it's about love.

If you tie that to thanking god for the birth of your savior, excellent.  Just keep out of my Wheaties.




* I posit that Christmas has grown beyond the ostensible intentions of the Church to celebrate the birth of Christ, and has morphed into a social construct more similar to the one as laid out by my rant.