For some indefinable reason, the holiday season depresses me. Hasn't failed once in the last five years: show me a Christmas tree, or a set of holiday lights, or play some unrelentingly upbeat and merry jingle, and I'm guaranteed to go from mildly irritated to genuinely pissed off - and from there to absolute despair - in ten minutes flat.
It always seems impossibly like everyone's trying too hard. Trying to scratch some joy and good cheer from the one seasonal festivity guaranteed to strain the pockets of all but the carefully-budgeted and the moderately wealthy.
Or perhaps it just pisses me off that what everyone - everyone I know, that is - is prepared to call a religious occasion is rarely more than an exercise in gross commercialism. And nobody likes it when I call them on it.
Christmas, my left toe. Giftmas; that's a far more accurate title.
Okay, any excuse for a party in the middle of winter, but gods and little fishes, man. There's such a thing as taking a good thing a bit too far.
It always seems impossibly like everyone's trying too hard. Trying to scratch some joy and good cheer from the one seasonal festivity guaranteed to strain the pockets of all but the carefully-budgeted and the moderately wealthy.
Or perhaps it just pisses me off that what everyone - everyone I know, that is - is prepared to call a religious occasion is rarely more than an exercise in gross commercialism. And nobody likes it when I call them on it.
Christmas, my left toe. Giftmas; that's a far more accurate title.
Okay, any excuse for a party in the middle of winter, but gods and little fishes, man. There's such a thing as taking a good thing a bit too far.