Sunday, December 25, 2005
A Holiday Message
If I am going to be completely honest with you (and I always am, except for that time I drank an entire box of wine and began shouting that I was Frederick B. Dent, Secretary of Commerce for the Ford administration), I have to admit that this is the first holiday season I have spent as an actual adult. Perhaps not an adult in the dietary sense, unless the food pyramid now has a Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes group, or the intellectual sense, though Phil of the Future touches on existentialist thought with an alarming frequency, but certainly in the employment sense, as I have recently put in more hours than Lindsay Lohan in a bathroom stall at the Viper Room the week after Father’s Day. Yes, I have a grown up job now, complete with a secretary who indulges my highlighter fetish and a handheld organizer so much smarter than me it probably even gets Mulholland Drive, and I am learning to accept the fact that I may not always be home in time for the Real World/Road Rules Challenge. I barely even play FreeCell any more and my Friendster usage has dropped to dangerous lows. I guess we all have our crosses to bear in life; I was just kind of hoping mine would be made out of delicious cotton candy.
But the point is that the holiday season is much different when you’re viewing it through the eyes of someone who doesn’t necessarily have two weeks off to watch A Muppet Christmas Carol on continuous repeat and build a Nativity scene out of toothpicks and Styrofoam peanuts. For adults, the holidays are less a matter of pining for that perfect Transformers-related gift and more a matter of wishing your boss would just give you the cash value of those company-logo-embossed aqua socks. They’re less about hoping Santa will come down your chimney and more about praying that Leon, the sociopathic drifter who lives in the abandoned Wendy’s three blocks down, won’t. They don’t mean days of sledding and building snow forts, they mean skidding on a patch of ice the size of Greenland and nearly crashing your Yugo into the lobby of the Dollar Daze store. Certainly there’s fun to be had in both versions of the holidays; it’s just that the fun in the adult version is the kind that generally comes with nipple clamps and a subscription to Gimp Weekly.
And, in all seriousness, maybe it takes the little annoyances to make us appreciate the big joys of the holidays a little bit more. Spending Christmas day sitting on your ass playing your old copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 with your sister might not seem like such a perfectly peaceful pastime if you hadn’t spent the entire day before Christmas waiting in line to buy your Aunt Margie a gift certificate at the Dress Barn. Hanukkah dinner might not seem so delicious without the two preceding weeks of vending machine sandwiches and half-thawed Hot Pockets. And Kwanzaa might not be so significant and moving without the prior thousands of years of oppression and slavery. I’m sure Jesse Jackson will back me up on this one.
As I got ready to write this thing, I went through a whole bunch of Christmas letters from years past. (Yes, I still have them all – I also have a play about horses I wrote in fifth grade and a high school English paper containing the phrase “love is the greatest power of them all,” if anyone’s interested.) A lot of things struck me – I used to think Michael Jackson jokes were really hilarious, for one thing – but mainly I just noticed how, as much as my life has changed, my sentiments really haven’t. I’ve always thought I have the greatest family and friends in the world, and I’m still grateful for all the amazing things you add to my life today. Happy holidays!
If I am going to be completely honest with you (and I always am, except for that time I drank an entire box of wine and began shouting that I was Frederick B. Dent, Secretary of Commerce for the Ford administration), I have to admit that this is the first holiday season I have spent as an actual adult. Perhaps not an adult in the dietary sense, unless the food pyramid now has a Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes group, or the intellectual sense, though Phil of the Future touches on existentialist thought with an alarming frequency, but certainly in the employment sense, as I have recently put in more hours than Lindsay Lohan in a bathroom stall at the Viper Room the week after Father’s Day. Yes, I have a grown up job now, complete with a secretary who indulges my highlighter fetish and a handheld organizer so much smarter than me it probably even gets Mulholland Drive, and I am learning to accept the fact that I may not always be home in time for the Real World/Road Rules Challenge. I barely even play FreeCell any more and my Friendster usage has dropped to dangerous lows. I guess we all have our crosses to bear in life; I was just kind of hoping mine would be made out of delicious cotton candy.
But the point is that the holiday season is much different when you’re viewing it through the eyes of someone who doesn’t necessarily have two weeks off to watch A Muppet Christmas Carol on continuous repeat and build a Nativity scene out of toothpicks and Styrofoam peanuts. For adults, the holidays are less a matter of pining for that perfect Transformers-related gift and more a matter of wishing your boss would just give you the cash value of those company-logo-embossed aqua socks. They’re less about hoping Santa will come down your chimney and more about praying that Leon, the sociopathic drifter who lives in the abandoned Wendy’s three blocks down, won’t. They don’t mean days of sledding and building snow forts, they mean skidding on a patch of ice the size of Greenland and nearly crashing your Yugo into the lobby of the Dollar Daze store. Certainly there’s fun to be had in both versions of the holidays; it’s just that the fun in the adult version is the kind that generally comes with nipple clamps and a subscription to Gimp Weekly.
And, in all seriousness, maybe it takes the little annoyances to make us appreciate the big joys of the holidays a little bit more. Spending Christmas day sitting on your ass playing your old copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 with your sister might not seem like such a perfectly peaceful pastime if you hadn’t spent the entire day before Christmas waiting in line to buy your Aunt Margie a gift certificate at the Dress Barn. Hanukkah dinner might not seem so delicious without the two preceding weeks of vending machine sandwiches and half-thawed Hot Pockets. And Kwanzaa might not be so significant and moving without the prior thousands of years of oppression and slavery. I’m sure Jesse Jackson will back me up on this one.
As I got ready to write this thing, I went through a whole bunch of Christmas letters from years past. (Yes, I still have them all – I also have a play about horses I wrote in fifth grade and a high school English paper containing the phrase “love is the greatest power of them all,” if anyone’s interested.) A lot of things struck me – I used to think Michael Jackson jokes were really hilarious, for one thing – but mainly I just noticed how, as much as my life has changed, my sentiments really haven’t. I’ve always thought I have the greatest family and friends in the world, and I’m still grateful for all the amazing things you add to my life today. Happy holidays!
