Bah humbug

I am going to admit something to you, and it's not very pretty.

Ready?

Here we go.

I really kind of like Christmas.

Okay, so there are parts of it that aren't exactly to my tastes. I think the overall red and green color palette is kind of hideous. I despise shuffling through crowded malls just to buy my brother-in-law some awful generic gewgaw like a combination screwdriver-hammer-flashlight. And I hate -- oh how I hate -- Christmas carols. The merry gentlemen can go rum-pum-pum themselves with a wassailing bowl for all I care.

But in general? I love it. I love anything that involves a parade, really, but Christmas in particular makes me happy. For one thing, you get to take everything in your sphere of influence -- houses, trees, small children -- and bitch them up in tinsel and lights and bling like they're doing drag in Vegas. And there's these wonderful things you do with food. You put cinnamon and brandy in fucking everything. Apple juice! Wine! Grampa! The world is mad with brandy!

And then under it all, underneath all the gaudy spectacle and the crass materialism and the drunken eggnog-fueled bad-idea hookups with coworkers, there's actually a sincere message at the core that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion. Even in the middle of winter, even in the bitter cold out here on the tundra, there's something to celebrate, because there's always a spring, and no darkness never ends.

Oh, that's such bullshit. It's all about the bad-idea hookups, really.