Saturday, December 25, 2010
Happy Holidays!
I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to phone it in for my annual holiday greetings this year. I mean, it would be so easy to just slap some random comments about syphilis and how Santa resembles a child molester on a card bearing some faux Victorian print, throw in an insert full of '90s pop culture references and whitewashed accounts of my personal and professional exploits (i.e. "caught with a hooker" becomes "made lots of new friends") and ask my secretary to hand write personal messages (like "Happy Holidays!" or "Congratulations on your Vasectomy!") without misspelling people’s names in any way that doesn’t vastly improve them (sorry, Mykell and Merrilyn, it’s just not happening). Then I could just drop them in the mail, postage due, and head home to learn some life lessons from a Reba marathon on Lifetime. But as much as I hate effort and love sassy redheads, I knew that I had a Moral Obligation (TM) to draw questionable parallels between Black Friday and the Boston Massacre and speculate wildly about the deviant sexuality of the Seven Lords a Leaping. And so here I am, facing a blank page with a fun size bag of Cheeseburger Doritos and, of course, a sense of abject terror.
But then again, aren’t the holidays really meant to be a time of joy and terror? For example, being surrounded by friends and family is a joy, but listening to your Aunt Cheryl describe her recent colonoscopy while messily devouring a plate of creamed corn is terrifying. Getting the Masters of the Universe shrinky dink set you begged your parents for is a joy, but thereafter having your failure to complete the Skeletor shrinky dink constantly turned into a convenient metaphor for all of your shortcomings is terrifying. Decorating for the holidays is a joy, but picking brown pine needles out of your soup through mid-March is... well, at least mildly distressing. None of this is exactly likely to be the subject of a Dan Brown thriller any time soon (although The Mistletoe Cabal does have a nice ring to it), but it can take its toll. That’s why the wise men brought Frankincense to the first Christmas; that shit can really take the edge off if you smoke it.
I am afraid I have never been that wise, however. Without the aid of any chemicals besides perhaps a Jolt Cola, I spent my formative Christmases in a polyester choral robe creating a fire hazard by wielding a lit candle and performing B-side carols for various rotary clubs, nursing homes, and other venues with tenuous grips on the concept of entertainment. One year I went door to door for a holiday food drive and was both threatened with tazing and introduced to the concept of sex by an especially enthusiastic Schnauzer. In college, I sustained a nasty hot glue gun burn attempting to fashion a life-sized nativity scene out of construction paper and had to make the most embarrassing trip to campus health services since Felicity’s friend asked for the morning after pill. Subsequent holidays have found me dropping my ninety-something-year-old grandmother in the snow on her front lawn and throwing up in the kitchen of a Cracker Barrel. I’m not saying that the holidays are trying to kill me, but I am looking into Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer’s alibi for the evening of December 22, 2004. At a showing of Adam Sandler’s Spanglish, my ass.
As for my alibi, it’s been another busy year. I had two trials, one of which was for a multi-billion dollar real estate investment fund and one of which was for a white supremacist with face tattoos. I had six weddings, which pushed my ability to do the chicken dance and make small talk with elderly people to the very brink. And in the watershed month of July 2010, I had that legendarily winning combination of jury duty, oral surgery, and an IRS audit. I’m pretty sure that was cosmic punishment for last year’s holiday message. But regardless, I will tempt fate by wishing you all the happiest of holidays and the best of new years.
I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to phone it in for my annual holiday greetings this year. I mean, it would be so easy to just slap some random comments about syphilis and how Santa resembles a child molester on a card bearing some faux Victorian print, throw in an insert full of '90s pop culture references and whitewashed accounts of my personal and professional exploits (i.e. "caught with a hooker" becomes "made lots of new friends") and ask my secretary to hand write personal messages (like "Happy Holidays!" or "Congratulations on your Vasectomy!") without misspelling people’s names in any way that doesn’t vastly improve them (sorry, Mykell and Merrilyn, it’s just not happening). Then I could just drop them in the mail, postage due, and head home to learn some life lessons from a Reba marathon on Lifetime. But as much as I hate effort and love sassy redheads, I knew that I had a Moral Obligation (TM) to draw questionable parallels between Black Friday and the Boston Massacre and speculate wildly about the deviant sexuality of the Seven Lords a Leaping. And so here I am, facing a blank page with a fun size bag of Cheeseburger Doritos and, of course, a sense of abject terror.
But then again, aren’t the holidays really meant to be a time of joy and terror? For example, being surrounded by friends and family is a joy, but listening to your Aunt Cheryl describe her recent colonoscopy while messily devouring a plate of creamed corn is terrifying. Getting the Masters of the Universe shrinky dink set you begged your parents for is a joy, but thereafter having your failure to complete the Skeletor shrinky dink constantly turned into a convenient metaphor for all of your shortcomings is terrifying. Decorating for the holidays is a joy, but picking brown pine needles out of your soup through mid-March is... well, at least mildly distressing. None of this is exactly likely to be the subject of a Dan Brown thriller any time soon (although The Mistletoe Cabal does have a nice ring to it), but it can take its toll. That’s why the wise men brought Frankincense to the first Christmas; that shit can really take the edge off if you smoke it.
I am afraid I have never been that wise, however. Without the aid of any chemicals besides perhaps a Jolt Cola, I spent my formative Christmases in a polyester choral robe creating a fire hazard by wielding a lit candle and performing B-side carols for various rotary clubs, nursing homes, and other venues with tenuous grips on the concept of entertainment. One year I went door to door for a holiday food drive and was both threatened with tazing and introduced to the concept of sex by an especially enthusiastic Schnauzer. In college, I sustained a nasty hot glue gun burn attempting to fashion a life-sized nativity scene out of construction paper and had to make the most embarrassing trip to campus health services since Felicity’s friend asked for the morning after pill. Subsequent holidays have found me dropping my ninety-something-year-old grandmother in the snow on her front lawn and throwing up in the kitchen of a Cracker Barrel. I’m not saying that the holidays are trying to kill me, but I am looking into Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer’s alibi for the evening of December 22, 2004. At a showing of Adam Sandler’s Spanglish, my ass.
As for my alibi, it’s been another busy year. I had two trials, one of which was for a multi-billion dollar real estate investment fund and one of which was for a white supremacist with face tattoos. I had six weddings, which pushed my ability to do the chicken dance and make small talk with elderly people to the very brink. And in the watershed month of July 2010, I had that legendarily winning combination of jury duty, oral surgery, and an IRS audit. I’m pretty sure that was cosmic punishment for last year’s holiday message. But regardless, I will tempt fate by wishing you all the happiest of holidays and the best of new years.
