I DON'T SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS, IT'S OFFENSIVE!!

I don’t say Merry Christmas, it’s offensive.

ON CHRISTMAS

For those who don’t know me that well, I’m kidding.  F**k those tree huggin’ radicals with their sanitized, sterilized, politically correct, horse shit.  You know why kids these days get so sick?  They don’t have immune systems.   They never learned to fight off all those germs.  Saying Merry Christmas to some one is only as offensive as someone coming up to you and saying how was that Cubs game, if you’re not a Cubs fan.  “Can you believe that fat kid won American Idol?”  “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s offensive, I don’t watch American Idol.   Why would you just assume that about me?  How dare you?”  Yee-ha!  Go America!

So let’s talk about Christmas now.  It’s what you do in December.  Now it’s what you do in October.  We love sugar, don’t we?  Don’t get me started on sugar.  But Christmas, now, that’s a topic.   We should all picture Burl Ives now, wearing tinted glasses and a straw hat, possibly in the form of a snow man but perhaps in a white suit with a black bolo tie.  Definitely with a white Van Dyke mustache.  Can you smell the chestnuts roasting? Oh, I think you can.  Did it just get real creepy in here?  Back to it, Sivart.  Am I the only person who thinks it’s all pretty weird?  Christmas.  I know, it’s for the kids.  I mean, I like it, for the most part, I’ll play along, but it is kind of weird.  The whole thing.

What are we all doing?  Carried away much?  So let’s break Christmas down.  What is it, firstly?  I’ve been charged with having to explain it to my alien friend Sivart606 from Alpha Centauri B.  Good dude.   Well, it’s the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.  Well, okay.  So December Twenty-Fifth is Jesus’ birthday.  No, but…Why’d they pick that day?  Excellent question, Sivart.  Nobody knows when Jesus was born.  So early on, someone, most likely a Roman, decided that usurping the pagan holiday would help ease the people into their newly reorganized religion. You know the one that saved their Roman Empire and brought the people back to them.  Kept them in line.   “These pagans have always celebrated on and around the winter solstice.  How can you expect them not to celebrate their favorite holiday?”  “You don’t, you just change it to be about something else.” Kind of like taking the focus off of one thing, the original reason, and playing up another aspect.  Wait, that’s sounds kind of familiar.  It reminds me of what Santa Claus once said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  But that’s impossible!   Ah, but of course the eye of the needle was referring to the skinny tunnels that led under the walls of ancient cities.  The camel had to be stripped of all its gear and cargo to kneel and be pulled and prodded through the tunnel.  So you can’t take it with you? asks Sivart.  No, buddy, that’s the point. 

So…When did it get so weird?  Well, I’d say it slowly evolved and became the bizarre, month long celebration it is today over the millennia.  Customs were added to older customs, many went back to pagan rituals and customs.  Gift giving and the Yule log being examples. 

Gift giving?  Why do we do that?  It’s not, for the most part, a genuine thing and so what’s the point of doing it?  When it is a genuine thing, then I’m all for it.  Give a gift to someone you love or someone you don’t even know, by all means, please do.  But the majority of gift giving at Christmas time is out of obligation.   We run around, fight each other, camp out, spend money we don’t have to give gifts to people that don’t need them or in most cases don’t even like them.  Can’t we all just call it a truce and stop?  If you see something and you think, oh, Javier would love this rug.  It would really pull his whole space together.  And you get it and you bring it to your friend Javier and you give it to him and he gives you a heartfelt thank you, even though now he feels obligated to get you something equally nice, but that’s not the point, Javier, then I’m all for it.  Give and give.  If someone is in need and you can help them out with a little gift, that’s what it’s about.  But not this. Gift giving should be a spontaneous action that comes from the heart.  Okay, says, Sivart, it is the one time of year you let the people who mean something to you in your life know how much you appreciate them.  Whatever, Sivart.   My wife is going to most likely (have a highly negative reaction towards me) when she reads this.  Because I don’t actually buy people gifts.  She does it all.  And I am very, very, very thankful to her and I want her to know how much I appreciate all she does.  It’s not easy and she busts her ass.  I should take a much more active role in stuff like that.  It’s just that I don’t get it.  It doesn’t really mean anything to me.  If I had my say, we wouldn’t do it.  Bah-humbug!   Have I lost the Christmas spirit for saying this?  I do like to see my children’s faces on Christmas morning.  But they get too many things and it doesn’t mean as much to them; certainly not as much as it did to those poor kids during the Great Depression, that’s for sure. Put that in your stove top hat and smoke it.  Okay, but there are those times when it is exciting to see those kids of mine truly excited.  But that’s it.  So, in conclusion, you should buy a couple of things for Christmas when your offspring are still young and gullible, but then that should be it.   

*I honestly do sometimes forget, and even take for granted, all the things my wife does.   She rocks!!

An excellent example of how customs have been added over the years, we’ve added a new one.  Elf on a Shelf.  It’s funny how that one starts out strong and then, by about a week or two in, that thing’s being thrown around the house and wherever it lands, is where that sneaky little bastard ran to in the night.  I have to admit, we lucked into a pretty funny Elf on the Shelf situation.   Last year someone bought us the Elf on a Shelf.  But technically it wasn’t the same Elf on the Shelf that was all the rage, it was a strange knock off elf.   And he’s a creepy looking little shit with a leer on his face, somewhere between Bob Hope and Hannibal Lecter.  He’s Chucky in an elf costume.  So after a couple of weeks my wife brings home the real Elf on a Shelf doll.  She’s all doe eyed and adorable.  So I had a ball with his creepiness once she arrived.  The original elf, the kids named Elfie.  You’d think my kids would be more creative but whatever.  And the new, real Elf on a Shelf was named Bella.  When I’d write notes to the kids as Elfie I’d write it with my right hand, note I am left-handed, and I’d purposely try to write like a kindergartener by using simple words and writing sloppily.  And when I’d write as Bella, I’d write as eloquently and properly as I could.   The couple had a tumultuous relationship.  He loved her from first sight.  She was afraid of him (at first.)   One morning the kids would find him holding her in his arms and her smile would appear very forced.  He wrote that he luved her.  She’s so pritty!  And she’d write, help me.  It put the kids in an awkward position because if you touch the elves they will lose their magic for one whole night.  She wrote that he scared her, but the kids didn’t want to touch them to pull him off of her.  So the next night she fought back and tied him up and hung him off of a cabinet in the kitchen with string.  She explained that they had had a heart to heart talk and that he wouldn’t be bothering her any more.  The next day he was found in the corner of the bathroom with his hands over his face, like he was crying.   He wrote that she broked his hart.  Then after that, my wife suggested I was taking it a bit too far and they became friends and it all went back to me just walking around the house at night trying to think of places I hadn’t hidden them before.    He really likes that spot in the window.

This all leads up to Santa Claus.  Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas, Kris Kringle.  Of all the customs, this one feels the strangest to me.   It started in Greece in the fourth century, when Saint Nicholas of Myra, a bishop, became famous for his generosity toward the poor.  He kept these poor young girls from being prostitutes by giving them dowries.  They made him a saint later and gave him January Sixth as his day.  Children were given gifts on that day until Martin Luther came along and suggested they move it to December Twenty-Fifth to bring the children’s interest back to Christ over the saints.   In Germanic culture the god Odin had a white beard and took nightly rides across the sky.  When converted to Christianity these concepts were married with Santa Claus.  The Dutch put a red cape on him.   Eventually all these versions merged into what is now Santa Claus.  And then in New York he really took on a whole new celebrity.  And poems and songs further added to the folklore over time; Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer being a more modern addition to the lore, for example.  Before I had children I was split on the whole concept of lying to my children about Santa Claus.  But since everyone does it, it’s okay.  It’s fun!  And it is.  And it will be very sad when they admit they know the truth.  That will break my heart.  But still, it’s weird.  The whole thing is a lot of work and money and time.  Ask my wife.  She’s running around like a one-eyed jack watching two flagpoles.  Maybe I should stop writing this blog and go help her out a little.

Just remember what Santa Claus always said, “He who is without sin, throw the first stone.”  Martin Luther never realized what he’d done.  So technically Santa Claus is pagan.  So that means the pagans turned it back around didn’t they?  I see what you did there, pagans!