I Am So Popular: Bah Humbug!

My annual protests are, of course, in vain. No matter how hard I wish for it, I might as well be a citizen of Hell wishing for ice water. Deleting December from the calendar is just not going to happen. And so I wait for it, my heart shrinking a little more each day, an equal and opposite reaction to that Grinch fella’s swelling ticker. Don’t try to cheer me up or convince me otherwise. Christmas is stupid. And to those of you who concur, I salute you.

You might think, after so many years, I could simply choose to ignore (at best) or grit my teeth through (at least) the holiday instead of falling apart. Doesn’t it seem like, armed with the knowledge that I’m allergic to Christmas, I could learn to avoid it and save myself from breaking out in an emotional rash? Doesn’t it seem that my insistence on telling as many people as possible—people cheerfully bustling around buying gifts and decorating their houses—that, in essence, they are idiots, is, perhaps, a bit over-reactive?

Look, I don’t want to be a jerk about it (really, I don’t) and I do wish I could block the whole thing and let you whores for the holidays have your ho-ho-ho’s in peace. But ignoring Christmas is on par with visiting Paris and avoiding seeing images of the Eiffel Tower. You try it.

Speaking of Paris, last year Warren spirited me away to that fine city to help me escape the holiday. It was not the first time I left the country to get away from all the fucking twinkle lights and forced jolliness. Many years, I’ve headed south of the border to hide from the holiday in Mexico. Now, I know what you’re thinking—don’t they celebrate Christmas in France and Mexico? Aren’t those both very Catholic countries?

Well, yes. However, for starters neither place makes such a big, fat commercial deal out of the day. And I never did get around to speaking Spanish with any fluency or French at all. So whatever the hell people are saying to each other about December 25th remains safely beyond my comprehension. Yeah, yeah, I know what Feliz Navidad and Joie Noel mean. But the sound of those words does not prompt the same Pavlovian urge to snarl that Merry Christmas does.

Last Christmas, Warren and I holed up in our borrowed Paris apartment, and hid under the covers sharing a pair of earbuds and some bad Chinese food, a tradition of his people. Being Jewish, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Christmas one way or the other, which helps a little in keeping me from going off the deep end.

So why do I hate this stupid holiday? To answer this question we must hop into my time machine and travel back in time to a land far, far away. Namely New Jersey. This is where, as a child, I was introduced to what Christmas is all about: seasonal depression, dashed expectations, and a bunch of lies about some fat dude in a red outfit. Annually we kids would thumb through the Sears catalogue making long lists of shiny items we had no hope of receiving. Then we were fed the line about how if we weren’t good, we were fucked. And that other line about how an invisible yet omnipresent Big Brother figure, aka Santa Claus, was monitoring our behavior from afar, prepared to deprive us if we weren’t well behaved.

How well I remember the night I sat at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping on the giggling below, realizing my three older sisters were, in fact, in charge of putting the gifts under a tree that made Charlie Brown’s look like a ten-foot Norwegian fir. The one-two punch of betrayal (What, no Santa?) and exclusion (a favorite pastime of my older siblings) about killed me.

In later years, I, too, got to lend an assist, partake in deceiving my younger siblings. We always erected our holiday twig on Christmas Eve. When I grew older, the task fell to me to apply tinsel whilst my father, deep into his holiday depression, lay prone on the couch directing me, by which I mean telling me what a shitty tinsel engineer I was while The Bells of Saint Mary’s played in the background.

I carried these memories with me. Every holiday, like clockwork, like the ghost of Christmas past, memories on a cellular level lurched up from the depths to grip me. I strategized ways to survive. Alcoholism was a tremendous boon, at least in the evenings. But the attendant hangovers the next day (and the next and the next) only magnified my misery. For a long time, I baked my way through the season, adopting the motto Keep the Oven Full So There’s No Room for Your Head.

I gave up the baking (and the drinking) a decade or so ago, and no one seems to have suffered the loss of my cheesecakes, which used to line every free inch of horizontal space, a fatty, sugary testament to my efforts to stay afloat emotionally. I also gave up a habit I had of going into a guilt-induced frenzy the night before, feeling bad for ruining Christmas for my own son—who was told from the get-go that Santa was a fraud-- making a mad dash up the aisles of HEB for some trinkets to bestow upon him in hopes he wouldn’t grow up with his own horrible memories. And then I started leaving the country every December, which proved my best strategy to date.

I can’t leave the country this year. Being an uninsured American in need of still more surgery—this time, cataract removal—I have been working three jobs for the past several months to pay cash for a new lens so I can better see all those twinkly lights. There’s no money left to fly to France or even take the bus to Mexico. And so I’m stuck here. This year, I’ve decided on a contrarian attack. I have orchestrated a full immersion plan, purposefully exposing myself to some of this holiday shit in the hopes of getting over my aversion. While I have no plans to ever embrace Christmas, I figure the least I can do is get used to it.

Which is how, last week, I found myself presiding over a wedding on the lawn of Mr. and Mrs. Littlefield in Clarksville. If you haven’t been, their place is on 12th Street, every square inch covered in lights and Christmas figures. I got so choked up around so much twinkle—a weepiness steeped in sadness yet tinged with a hint of puzzled admiration for the Littlefields’ desire to provide joy— that it was hard to get through the ceremony. But I did it, and it was fun. (Don’t tell anyone I said that.)

I also went to see Martin Burke and Meredith McCall, accompanied by pianist Jason Connor, in ZACH’s Santaland Diaries, written by David Sedaris. Ever since I saw Martin and Meredith in The Drowsy Chaperone I’ve wanted to marry both of them and have them sing to me day and night. And I’ve been a Sedaris fan for a very long time. I was not disappointed. In fact, I wet my pants continuously throughout the show which is peppered with enough cheery cynicism about the trappings of holidays— family visits, trips to see the mall Santa— that I risked, only briefly, sort of liking Christmas.

And I headed over to Flipnotics to see Southpaw Jones and Matt the Electrician united, at long last, onstage. I had a hunch, and I was right, that Paw would trot out his Christmas song, which has never been (and will never be) recorded anywhere. I cannot tell you the contents of this song, only that you must hear it for yourself. Matt took a stab at his holiday song, too, my other Christmas favorite, and promises to do it in its entirety when they perform again next Wednesday (also at Flipnotics).

Come Saturday, I’ll join my Jewish partner in the Santa Rampage, hundreds of Santas storming Sixth Street, drinking until they puke all over their fake beards. I won’t last long, I’m sure. But it will be another baby step in letting go of the hate.

Spike Gillespie wishes you godspeed through the stupid holidays. She is seeking nominations for the 2011 Kick Ass Awards. And she hopes you’ll sign up for her writing workshops which are happening in Jan/Feb.