'Tis the season to be cantacerous

I’ll make an exception for the kids and perhaps even for that curious winter solstice ritual of decorating a pine tree, but besides that Christmas blows and it blows thus.

I’ve worked in the shipping industry for most of my adult life,but even most lay people who are only occasionally alert will have noticed that all this holiday hullabaloo is first and foremost about using a crass mixture of religious inanity and pagan myths to rake in some good-old cash.
So much so that all the importers start filling the container ships, coming from you-know-where, as early as July, to have the shelves of the big-box stores stocked for the mindless cattle that will come crowding through the automatic doors as soon as the Halloween starter pistol has gone off.
The herd will obediently -and precisely on cue- run, shop and drool all the way through Thanksgiving,and their Pavlovian, spastic purchasing delirium will rise to a feverish crescendo when Christmas, that grand-daddy of all excess consumerism, looms into their blinkered view.
In January the sales start to milk the exhausted wallets just a little bit more.

If people actually enjoyed spending that elephantine pile of money on all that useless crap, like giant plastic inflatable Santas, I wouldn’t mind so much.
Take a look around in your local mall in the weeks before Christmas and try to detect even a hint of bliss on the faces of these well-trained bovine creatures as they wrestle their way through the crowded parking lots and food courts and stores.
Oh boy, are they having fun!

And if you are hell-bent on being of good cheer, I have no idea why you are waiting for permission from the GAP's marketing division to adopt this attitude, and why restrict all this loving of your fellow humans to a few days in December?

Mandatory fun is seldom fun at all and that is my biggest beef with frigging Christmas.

Giving someone a present is great, as is getting together with friends and family for a good dinner.
But to do so because it is a certain date takes all the fun out of it and makes the present-giving ceremony empty and even slightly suspect.
My hunch is that most people go along with all this proscribed and costly ‘fun’ because they are afraid to actually give shape to their own lives and live on their own terms.

And don't get me started on the scrotum-crushing Christmas ‘music’ that I will have to endure in every elevator and every grocery store from Thanksgiving to December 25; those same 23 god awful shitty songs, every fucking year!
I swear, I will dig up Bing Crosby and shoot him in the head if I hear that crappy, sentimental garbage [also the best-selling song of all times] one more jingling time.

There is something disturbingly vacuous and even indecent about people who go all misty-eyed over the simulacrum of a time and place, full of carolers and rosie-cheeked uncles with arms full of gift-wrapped toys, that never existed; fake memories, false sentiment.
God damn you,Thomas Kinkade!

Christmas ?

Humbug !