Ravings of a Christmas Hater

The war on Christmas will be suspended when Christmas returns to its original 1967 borders

I find a hard time fully enumerating in detail the depth and breadth to which I fucking hate Christmas.

It’s not the feast. I love to cook and entertain guests, especially family. It’s not the decorations, because I also love shiny colorful things. It’s not the time off, or the weather, which I both love. It’s the gifts. The gifts ruin the entire experience for me so badly that I dread the entire holiday every year.

Some people love the gift part of Christmas, and I do not hold that against them. But if I were to receive a perfect Christmas gift, it would be the gift of not having to give a gift. Because the gifts aren’t gifts at all. The gifts are obligations. Just buy yourself something, wrap it, and stick a to/from onto it that says it’s from me. Bring it to my house, open it, and say “aww, you shouldn’t have!” That would be wonderful.

When picking Christmas gifts, I have to balance the intricate, complicated, competing pillars of social signaling, or how socially connected am I to this person, and wealth signaling, which is whether the gift is too cheap or expensive based on the level of social connection and also based on my own means to purchase gifts, weighted against the perception I might wish to convey about what my gift giving means might be, both in reality and within the perception of my social circle. That is exhausting. It is a combination of every single thing I hate about social interaction wrapped up into a single decision, which must then be made for every one of my social connections, every year, at the same time.

But that’s not all. A Christmas gift is an obligation to purchase a future gift, which means when you perform the complicated multifactor calculus of social signaling and wealth signaling you also have to account for last year’s gifts, including whatever relevant social cues were supposed to be extracted from the last year’s go round of gift giving, for those talented enough to extract them. Then last year’s gift’s relative value must be weighted against the relative change in social connection, gift giving means, and intended wealth signaling since the last awful gift giving experience.

And since this complicated multivariate social calculus is second nature to some people, they revel in the experience of not only being able to waltz through December easily, buying all the perfectly valued gifts, but they also subconsciously lord their prowess over those like me who can’t maintain all the variables at once in our heads, and can’t even be sure we remembered each gift we’re bound to give when we use spreadsheets and elicit help from others. Which makes the season into a season of subtextual braggartry and shame.

And that’s not all.

Because some people are good at this, and want to show how good they are at it to everyone else, corporate interests exacerbate their fervor to stoke the fires of the capitalist system by using Freudian (Jungian?) marketing strategy two steps from brainwashing, creating a class of consumer-zombies whose seeming only contribution to the human condition is to increase the net planetary trash load.

Men who feel as I do have an easy time eschewing this hatred of gift giving because they can push the activity off on their wives. But then it takes on a second level of social status jockeying as the Facebook Moms all start trying to compete with whatever weird Etsy granola crap Karen du Cul-de-sac did last year.

And you can straight up forget any religious or spiritual value earned during the season, because nobody has any time. We’re too busy buying crap we don’t need to put in boxes inside bigger boxes inside shiny foil paper encasements to be removed, unboxed, and unboxed again in different states after we drive ten hours through hoards of other consumer-zombies all socially obligated to enact the same absurd ritual after they braved the seventy two car pileup on I-80 west of Cleveland. There’s no time for Jesus in all that, and if there is, it’s just to poke your head into the church to remind everyone there that you’re a Christian, just like everyone else is doing on the same day, while the whole sanctuary will be collecting cobwebs again in January.

I wonder if there is a specific cleaning industry which biannually capitalizes on cleaning sanctuaries the week before Christmas and Easter. I wonder what their marketing looks like. “Scrub All Ye Faithful.” “A Spray in a Manger” “My Brother’s Sweeper.”

“Go Dust Ye Merry Gentlemen.” That’s the winner.

This is why I love Thanksgiving. Decorations yes. Feast yes. Weather change yes. Family and friends yes. No Fucking Presents.

I am not the second messiah, nor am I the King of Christendom. I cannot change Christmas, nor would I even have the power to do so if I were Christ Reborn. It’s too big, too out of hand, too uncontrolled. In the year 2100 Christmas decorations will go up on July 5th. AI Gift Engines will calculate the relative social dynamic capital mandated by your status, wealth, and social media activity to build your Christmas shopping list for you, pipe it B2B directly to a purchase and delivery chain managed by Amazon Saturn Limited, extract payment for it from your Bitcoin portfolio, and mail it to all the necessary recipients, who will then have their own AI Gift Reception Engines unwrap each present, burn the packaging, write a thank you note, and throw the gift into the recycling bin to be churned up into base materials from which to build more gifts. Then your Thank You Note Reception Bot will receive the note, burn it, and increase the stored social capital score of the person who sent the note for next year.

We’ll probably still use the USPS though. The mailman lobby will be very powerful in 2100.

The Fraggles had it right. I saw a Fraggle Rock episode when I was a child that enraptured me. Every year at the Winter Solstice, this estranged underground world of Jim Henson puppets would give one gift. One fraggle gave it to the next fraggle, they gave it to another fraggle, they gave it to a third fraggle, and so forth until 1.0 Dunbars of fraggles had each received one and only one gift, the same gift, and the gift landed back on Fraggle Alpha to be shoved into a drawer until next year. They all got one gift, they all got to give one gift, the social calculus was done in advance, and they added no disposable matter to Marjory the Great and Wise Trash Heap. The oceanic plastics in the Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch grew no further by the actions of a fraggle.

What Christmas has become to me, due to the gifts, is enough to make me want to abandon Christianity entirely, put on a terry cloth furry suit, and join Fraggle Rock. Or become a Jew.

Hanukkah sounds nice.

♫ Let My Steeple Glow ♫