Index

The “C” Word

My wife said it this morning.  The “C” word.

Christmas

She mentioned that annual festival of guilt trips, retail gluttony and general nastiness with happiness in her voice.  Oh, yeah - there used to be some religious significance to screw things up even more, but that has long since faded out of the picture except among diehards.

I knew it was coming in the back of my mind, but before this morning it was just a freight train way down the tracks - far enough away to be able to ignore it for at least a while.  Now it is right in my face.  So much for a reasonable day.  She even managed to beat the advertising blitz that keeps getting earlier every year.

She was talking about the annual holiday of oxymorons, where “Peace on Earth” is all over the retail signage while the rich count their windfalls from the latest arms sales to some poor third world country.   The excuse for the mothers of the rich and middle class to find ways to guilt-trip their kids into buying absurd gifts for relatives they hardly know.  The time of year when giving to charity is on the lips of the rich (only the lips, mind you) while the homeless are trying to find a way to survive another hard winter dodging police batons and kicks from people passing by, and when the poor have to find a way to pay the soaring heating bills while the Republicans find a way to help the rich get richer.  A wonderful holiday.

This is the holiday that makes suicide rates soar because of the extreme levels of guilt and stress associated with it.  The loneliness of existence seems meaner and harder when every one else is celebrating, adding to the depression for many of us.  Some of us have memories associated with the family shit that happens around the holidays to add to things, while many more of us make new memories of dealing with relatives that we are forced to endure, relatives that we otherwise blissfully forget about the rest of the year.

It is the meanest, ugliest, most cruel “holiday” of the year.

Why the fuck can’t people just leave it alone and let it go away?  The money people have long ago squeezed the life out of it, so just take it out and give it a merciful death before the essential cruelty of it drives more of us to suicide to escape it, please?