Christmas Cheer? Not Here!!
The only thing worse than going into a Wal-Mart is going into a Wal-Mart during the Christmas season.
I’ve loathed the holiday season for as long as I can remember. I’ve decided that the main reason for this is the fact that the holiday season always turns my life into a series of obligations. Combine this with the shitty weather that is a given this time of year, the crowds of people that are virtually unavoidable, and the fact that I’ll be even broker than usual until March, and you have a perfect storm of despair and contempt that basically sucks any potential enjoyment out of the equation that may or may not have been there to begin with.
There’s also another element that makes this time of year a truly dismal prospect: It makes my job harder.
My job requires me to convince people to spend money on legitimately necessary auto repairs. My income is determinate on my performance in this one responsibility. This is much more difficult when people have no money because they spent 10 times the suggested retail price on the black market for the latest Tickle-Me-Elmo doll that their snot-nosed, spoiled fucking toddler just had to have. Why does Christmas have to automatically remove most peoples’ common sense mechanism? People rack up hundreds of dollars in unnecessary debt just to buy a bunch of people a bunch of shit that they don’t need.
Instead of “The Holiday Season”, they should refer to this time of year as “The Idiot Season”. I know, idiots are always in season. But the thing is, with Christmas, all of the idiots are out at the same time. This makes typically routine tasks that much more daunting. The number is idiots out is never zero, and unless you’re a hermit, you’re always going to be forced to encounter them on some level. But the numbers of moronic people simultaneously out to accomplish the exact same thing is staggering, and it gets worse every year.
Thank Allah for Amazon.com.
Being a parent, the prospect of my daughter’s happiness and excitement during this time of year dampens my disdain for this dreadful season initially, but unfortunately this anesthetic effect is only temporary. The thing is, I’d like Christmas if it weren’t such a burden. But I have no choice in the matter. Luckily, I have Angie, who takes care of the planning and decorating and most of the buying of the food and presents and such. But the biggest problem is the unavoidable inconveniences that I’m forced to endure. The kid thing is nice at first, but Christmas to me is like that movie Groundhog Day; it starts around the 20th of the month and repeats itself every day for about a week. Then her birthday hits and it’s three or four more days of presents and cake and mayhem.
I now realize why so many animals hibernate through the winter: they do it to avoid Christmas.
