Bizarro is brought to you today by Here Come The Holidays.I'm not one of those people who complain about seeing Santa and hearing Xmas songs before Thanksgiving. I tend to complain that I have to endure these things at all, any time of year, because I truly despise the ugly, crass, festival of insincerity that Xmas has become. This is a holiday that should be celebrated quietly at home, if at all, and those of us who do not celebrate it should not even notice its passing. Like Yom Kippur.
That's the way it was before Washington Irving decided to make up a lot of holiday traditions and promote the idea that Xmas should be a big, noisy, tacky whoop-de-doo. Stores caught onto the idea and helped it along and before you know it, most Americans were celebrating Xmas with gifts and songs and decorations as if it were an ancient tradition.
I'm sure things were more-or-less within reason in those early days, but like everything else modern-day America touches, it is now a ghastly commercial orgy that assaults the eyes and ears of everyone within 500 miles of its borders. I even saw giant Xmas decorations at a department store in a Buddhist country in Asia back in 2000. Apparently you have to go to Iran to escape elves and flying reindeer.
So I say, "Pull that trigger, Mr. Pilgrim, and bury the evidence before it gets out of hand. You have no idea what you're in for."
Yes, I know I'm a huge pain-in-the-ass Grinch/Scrooge about this. All my friends and family gleefully celebrate Xmas while I sit quietly at home without decorations and with the TV mute on, lest I accidentally subject myself to the sound of jingling bells during a Best Buy commercial. (Just typing that made my skin crawl.)
How did I get this way? I have no idea. I enjoyed it as a kid – Santa, toys, the food, the tree, the TV specials, the songs, mom bringing home sailors on holiday leave and making me wait in a box in the basement, the lights and decorations. But as an adult, year by year, I became increasingly uncomfortable with it until I finally snapped like a dry holly branch under the hoof of a plummeting reindeer and declared myself the archenemy of all things Xmas. Self indulgent hypocrisy has always turned my stomach and modern American Xmas is the blaring, screeching, glittering, multi-billion-dollar embodiment of it. To my mind, anyway.
Here's hoping you all have a nice holiday season, please keep the noise down.
