Christmas From The Sidelines
Editors’ Note: In anticipation of becoming a sparsely-read author of an unsuccessful blog, I wrote the majority of this last Christmas Eve.
12/24/07
The other week, while flipping between NBA Basketball, The Squid and the Whale, and a study guide for Corporate Finance, I came across “The Grinch” cartoon and threw the remote to the side. For some reason, I just had to watch. I was eight years old again and I still hated Christmas.
For many people, “The Grinch” is a touching story about the holiday spirit, generosity, and doing the right thing. We’re supposed to root against the green creature and not want to touch him with a 39-and-a-half foot pole. If “The Grinch” were around today, he’d be a sex offender. Honestly though, I couldn’t help but empathize with “The Grinch.” I mean, just who the fuck do the Whos think they are anyway? The only character I really felt bad for was the dog. Who cares if the Whos get their lousy presents, there’s a dog here who’s going to have back problems.[1]
I also want to set the record straight on Dr. Seuss himself, a man who made his bones drawing racist WWII cartoons of German and Japanese soldiers. I mean seriously, the guy was a bigot. “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is nothing but religious propaganda, a proselytized pamphlet disguised as a hypnotically entertaining children’s cartoon. I’m onto you Seuss. Just what are you a doctor of anyWho?[2] I challenge you to tell me that “The Grinch” isn’t a metaphor for a Jew who resents Christmas and then finally converts.
Well I am a Jew who resents Christmas. My ideal Christmas consists of Chinese food, a trip to the movies, and getting hammered. This year I am particularly looking forward to the Matzah Ball, the Jew event of the year where single Israelites gather on Christmas Eve to get drunk on He-Brew and hook up. There is nothing more painful than watching a Jew dance. A Jew dancing makes Elaine from Seinfeld look like Gregory Hines.
Meanwhile, my Christian friends send me text messages that read “enjoy your Kung Pao Chicken Jewboy!”, “make sure to water your Hannukah bush,” and my all-time holiday favorite, “thanks for killing Jesus, I just got Halo 3.”
This brings me to the debate of the sickening commercialization of Christmas and its inescapability outside of anyone who lives under a poker-faced inhabitant of Easter Island or some other rock.[3] Every year, hi-brow publications like The New Yorker and other magazines that I tell people that I read but really don’t publish articles about either a.) how commercialization is not a new cultural phenomenon, or b.) how corporate marketers have sunk to a new low this holiday season. But these articles can’t solve anything. That these articles and naysayers lampoon the mistletoe and egg noggin hangovers that others romanticize is bullshit and shouldn’t give you, the one who tells kids that Santa Clause doesn’t care about black people, some false sense of non-conformist entitlement; that you’re somehow the lone gunman on holding such a self-actualized conviction. Note to those who wish they were original: just because you’re drinking alone doesn’t mean you’re alone and just because you listen to The Beach Boys during December doesn’t make you some kind of apathetic historian to what unfolds and unwraps and regifts itself year after year.[4] It’s unavoidable and you’re better off acknowledging that you’re in on it. Just be aware that this admission does not make you Columbus or Zhang He or any other fucking scurvy-ridden, lemon-sucking adventurer or small-pox-toting missionary.[5] You’re part of the group whether you like it or not.[6]
To wrap up this prototypical, snow-shoveled dissertation,[7] we’re all perfectly aware of the commercialization of Christmas and these articles and criticisms of the unobvious obvious will never solve anything. The writers know it and we, the perpetual reader of perpetual articles about trudged-over topics, know it. But every year, as reliable as a drunken Salvation Army Santa Claus, the same article is trotted out like a diabetic reindeer and mildly revised to adjust to the mini-trends and gossip gripping the public and denouncing the wave of holiday shopping and faux-holiday cheer that occurs. For me, I am about as sick and tired of the counter-culture complainers of Xmas as I am of those who embrace it. This article isn’t anti-Christmas. If anything, this article is anti-anti-Christmas.[8] So go, spread your Christmas cheer, actually, don’t spread it, just try and be like us Jews. Internalize the fervor in your homes and don’t tell anybody about it unless their name ends in –stein or –man or –berg. So pass the kung-pao chicken and refill the egg nog you green goofy-foot sonuvabitch bastard! Don’t just sit there, use the pole that Mom gave you for Channukah last night.
[1] And possibly pneumonia, a small price to pay for not having to wear an embarrassing dog sweater that would only be embarrassing if dogs indeed had any form of actual self-conscious. (It’s almost like feeling bad for the fire hydrant soaked in dog urine.)
[2] Looking at The Grinch’s feet, my guess is podiatry.
[3] Even those who smoke aforementioned rocks are susceptible to the paradox, e.g. the homeless guy I gave a dollar to the other day who still maintained a politically correct adage on his cardboard sign that wished everyone a neutral “Happy Holidays.”
[4] “God Only Knows” how much I hate that Beach Boys song. Also, if you were introduced to the Beach Boys vis “Love Actually” then I suggest that you watch the “Grinch” on continuous loop until you are cured of tree sap holiday movies.
[5]I thought about mentioning the Treaty of Tordesillas here but that would be overkill.
[5a] Shit.
[6] Ex: Oh my G-d, you watch Arrested Development too! Wow that’s impressive. I thought I was the only one. And how original that you also like other name-drop insert-here seemingly obscure musician/surrealist director/whatever you think you do that nobody else has ever done.
[7] Children’s Tylenol procured rant.
[8] Again, even admitting such doesn’t make this writer some standout rogue. As surely as there isn’t a Santa Clause there is a small lesion of us out there somewhere, not congregating with each other, sitting alone in the apartment adjacent to your ugly sweater party and across the hall from Grandpa’s prescription-revitalized-chestnuts-roasting-on-an-open-wildfire family Christmas.
Just Desert
Disclaimer: I am writing the majority of this in invisible type for fear of anyone in class being able to read what I am currently writing about them. With taht being said, I profusely apologize for the following grammatical errors. Frst nad foremost is the sudent government representative to my immediate high noon. I have currently counted that he has five winter caps espousing the Obama/Biden ticket. The current color is red, but I soon anticipate transforming his white one into a more maroon varietal. He also has brown, blue, and black in his collection. On numerous occasions, other students who have validated his need for attention have asked him to remove the hat. In response to these requests he has adamantly refused, saying he is “still too proud.” I agree. He did his part in getting the word out to the people who were already going to vote for Obama by asking them to vote for Obama and giving them winter caps.[1] The new president-elect would be equally proud to learn of this support from a white-bread milk dud from Greenwich, Connecticut. At the same time though, I have to be respectful and recognize that this is one of my peers, which coincidentally is something that I feel many of us would like to throw him off of if this town had a boardwalk.
However, I have come to realize that my preoccupied disdain amounts to mere avoidance to the more pressing topic at hadn. Finals are imminently approaching and I’m tempted to go live in the mountains and not bother anybody until the coast is Clearasil. I am finally starting to study in between repeated viewings of movies that I’ve seen more than twice. My thinking has been marginally altered when I study. Whereas before I was studying like Mother Goose, with the hopes of being able to regurgitate facts and formulas to an ugly duckling of an exam, law school examinations bear more semblance to the head-spinning exorcisms that require an old priest and a young choirboy. I suppose the real test of this will all come out in my psychoanalysis, where an ink blot will probably end up looking like a fucking oil spill.
Shit, now the Obama dude is looking at the abroad program in Chile, which I too am thinking about for the summer. Although there are certain people here who in good faith have tried to be likable people, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is more to being a likable person than trying to be just that. With a hearty Thanksgiving still in my head, I think I’ll go home and watch Alive for a third time in between finalizing my outline for civil procedure. Nothing like a man-made meal in the middle of the Andes. [2] I wonder what they ate for dessert.
For my final contracts class, the professor invoked some saying by Oliver Wendell Holmes and some other law historian that called lawyers the background to social change as opposed to monarchies and other government entities. Besides the original pimp, lawyers are the oldest representation to the oldest profession and have been arbiters of awkward and perpetually pubescent social change. [3]
The professor then concluded it all with a heavy pronouncement about the answer to life: contracts. I mildly disagree with such a statement and draw your attention to the beginning of said life. It is clear that at the purported time of the professor’s initial contract formation, i.e. conception, I could not have had a say in the matter itself. Furthermore, if it was made by mutual mistake[4] then there is no contract whatsoever. This seems to indicate that I lacked the capacity to agree to life and therefore the contract is a nullity for failure of capacity as well as the undue influence by third parties. Therefore, if contracts are indeed the essence of life, and you don’t have a say in its formation, there is no bargained for consideration and thus, no real duty owed to anybody. Hence, from a true contractarian’s viewpoint, life is pointless. Maybe I’m a little disenfranchised, but I’m not sure I’m ready to support such deductive reasoning, which may be why I prefer torts. [5]
Right now, a bunch of people in the class are asking if they can listen to their iPods during the exam. These people will meticulously construct a playlsit with what I can imagine to be a mix between pump-up, confidence boosting hip-hop and neuron-firing Mozart that their parents played in their cribs when they were still shitting themselves. [6] I personally will be playing an eclectic mix of cold sweat and heavy breathing. I have already begun to meditate and have developed a mantra that has suited my cause. [7] As to studying and what lies ahead, it’s time to get the fire ready for the Hell of it. I think that I’ll take the soccer team’s advice and just desert. It’s time to cook this meet.
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