Mark this on your calendars. The Christmas season now starts on November 10. I know this because of my encounters with a dancing snowman and bell-ringing Salvation Army bum.
In theory, we could have two and a half weeks of smiling, cardboard turkeys. Unfortunately, the local grocery stores have opted to skip Thanksgiving promotion entirely and head straight to the saccharine stench of Christmas paraphernalia.
As I walked out of the bread aisle in the A&P last night, a life-sized snowman sprung to life and started singing Have a Holly Jolly Christmas while dancing to its own beat. This goddamn thing had a motion detector, evidently designed to scare the shit out of burglars. If it ain't for burglars, then who the fuck is it for? Can you imagine a group of teenagers walking down the street one night, hearing this snowman blurt out some Christmas song, jumping fifteen feet into the air in complete terror, then not shredding the goddamn thing and taking a bat to its owners' car and living room window? I can't. And I was a teenager, so trust me, I know.
Every year, I am becoming progressively less interested in this holiday. I'm not going to bash the idea as it applies to kids (at least, a few weeks of it, not two fucking months), but what the hell is it supposed to mean to full-grown adults? Apparently, it means either fake snowmen or annoying Salvation Army bell-ringers. Either superficial bullshit, or whining pleas to sacrifice. Nothing in between.
Perhaps "superficial" isn't the right word. "Superficial" implies that there's something there, just not much of it. There's nothing in a singing and dancing snowman. The person who buys one of these pieces of trash has conceded that Christmas is about nothing more than following mindless traditions.
The central mindless tradition of Christmas seems to be throwing your money away. Whether on ridiculously expensive presents for relatives you see three times a year, metallic decorations for your fake fireplace, a nice Turkey dinner for bums you could care less about in June, or prefab thoughts scrawled on the surface of a three-dollar piece of cardboard from the Hallmark Fake Soul Manufacturing Conglomerate.
In recent years, I would say that "ideally" Christmas might mean something. And maybe it does. But if it's going to mean anything, its meaning has to be completely reinvented. Because as far as I can tell, there's nothing left.
