That holiday season in December

I thoroughly detest having to leave my room between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Going anywhere immediately results in my senses being assaulted by the sights, sounds, and plastic smiles of the commercial season.

I hate Christmas lights displayed on buildings. It just doesn’t do anything other than show off that either you are a cheapskate, or you were competitive enough to mortgage your house to run a display that diverts airplane pilots. If you belong to the lower class, you usually have to pull off a second mortgage to foot the energy bill that is more than the rest of the year combined. Additionally, these displays are terribly distracting while driving. Most of us will look when we see something flashing, something which Christmas lights capitalize on.

Then there is this really weird phenomena of people deciding that they ought to be nice because it is the Christmas season. You can immediately tell because they are patently out of practice. If you decide that it would be a good time to be nice merely because it is the Christmas season, you really need to rethink what kind of person you are. Just because it is not Christmas does not give you an excuse to be a jerk the rest of the year. If anything, be a jerk during the Christmas season and not during the rest of the year. People might like you better. Even better still, if you know you are a jerk during the rest of the year, why are you a jerk?

Then there is the incredibly annoying debate of “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Season’s greetings”. Give it a rest people! If you are annoyed by the fact that people are willing to acknowledge your existence with a seasonal context, you may be the kind of person who doesn’t need to be acknowledged in the first place. Almost, but not quite worse is the bending over backwards to try to be as specifically non-specific as possible. Stop insulting mine and everyone else’s intelligence and just say what you want. “Happy period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s to you too!”

Then there is the constant fundraising running rampant during the holidays. People have already spent their hard earned money putting up Christmas lights. Do you think that they can afford to eat, much less give you money? Even if I give people the benefit of the doubt there is still the fact that every corporation has its “winter giving drive”. There is a whole 45 weeks out of the year that you could be soliciting donations. For some strange reason they always congregate around Christmas.

Finally, it is annoying having to hear the same hackneyed songs by defunct artists, year after year. Any artist who puts out a Christmas album (with the exception of Mannheim Steamroller who made it on the charts by selling Christmas music) has run out of creativity and it shows. Artists feel obligated to regale the captive audience with every flashy tool in their arsenal. The result is bad music. I don’t need to hear multiple versions of “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” To make things worse, most of the time the songs are usually only in one genre, so you get the soft rock versions all the time. All I want for Christmas are some ear plugs!