“Many banks have a new kind of Christmas club in operation. The new club helps you save money to pay for last year’s gifts.”
– Anonymous

Christmas is hell on people. It’s hell on ex-pats estranged from their homelands, hell on the depressed and disconnected, hell on senior citizens shunted from son-and-daughter in-laws’ houses like furniture, hell on separated parents and their children as they try to put a brave face on a season that celebrates nuclear families and cooked turkeys and extended clan. By the first week in December most of us are sick of the stress, the spending, the drink, the hype, the bemoaning of the hype, and the Tommy Tiernan DVDs.
Christmas is a concept by which we measure our poverty. Like love, it’s a form of temporary insanity that hits you right in the wallet. Everybody loses but the retailers. In the last week of November, some genius in the local council thought it a good idea to mount speakers all over my hometown and blare chintzy Christmas music at full volume, the aural version of being force-fed Prozac. It was but the first last straw of the season.
For years I nurtured dark fantasies of telling the kids Santa Claus had been murdered. In time, I settled for the more realistic prospect of one day simply bypassing the entire Yuletide hoo-ha. This year that possibility is almost within grasp, and I’m giddy with excitement. The offspring are departing for the US in mid December and staying until New Year’s. I’ll meet them for lunch ten days before the big date, swap presents, wish them the season’s best, and return home to revel in the absence of trappings and wrappings. Fuck the tree and fuck the decorations. Fuck the boxes of biscuits and the mailing list. I’ll text my nearest and dearest on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, stock up on food and firewood, write and read and hatch the fire and watch DVDs and play music.
Peace on earth and goodwill to all men!

“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
– Dr. Seuss

“Satan gives each girl and boy/ Just what she or he deserves”
- James Chance