Oh great, here it is again, the Christmas season. The time when you can’t go into a super market to buy food without being bombarded by a symphony of horrific, monotone, elevator-music renditions of Christmas classics. The worst of it is, they don’t play it loud enough so that you really have a legitimate excuse to be pissed off. In fact, they play it so quietly that you hardly even notice it until you get back to your car and realize you’re humming the odious tune to “Deck the Halls” or some other god-awful song. It’s like sadistic sub-conscious re-programming that’s supposed to slide you into that state of too much egg nog intoxication.

You know what I think when that damn supermarket “jolly” music starts playing? I shake my head and wonder how the people of other religions who live in America must feel? I mean, isn’t it blatantly disrespectful to other ideologies that America goes completely ape-shit over Christmas and lets all the other ones pass without a whimper. Or worse, during the Christmas season they say “Happy Holidays” as if they give a fuck about your religious beliefs and are actually acknowledging them. I don’t even know what the Islamic equivalent of Christmas is, that seems pretty ethnocentric and disrespectful. Why the hell hasn’t there ever been an ABC after school special about the Christmas equivalents of other religions in the world?

But the worst of it is that all of the Christmas songs are so outdated that you have to get an English dictionary from two hundred years ago to even understand what the original meaning was. Thank god people just blindly sing the words and don’t actually ever pause to think about them. What if your grandparents got over-excited about “don me now our gay apparel” and spent the Christmas family reunion dressed up like the Village People?

Oh yeah, another shitty part is being forced to sit and watch Grandma and Grandpa get all teary-eyed as Bing Crosby and Dean Martin sing the tunes in black and white with false, drunk, sincerity. Do you know why your grandparents are teary-eyed? Because they’re remembering their youth. Do you know why you deserve to be pissed off about being forced to watch this? Because your youth is being squandered and wasted as you sit there with them. What the fuck dude? How can they possibly justify to themselves that you have some sort of responsibility to THEIR youth when they concurrently show a BLATANT disrespect for YOURS!

ARGHHHH!

Yeah, Christmas, peace on Earth and all that bullshit. Except nobody bothers to mention that the only people who want peace on Earth are the rich assholes who are oppressing everybody else. That’s not what starving people in the desert want, no, those people want and need revolution. In fact, that’s what Christ preached! I’m so fucking sick of that bitchy, touchy-feely wife or sister-in-law or cousin who sits their with this overly soft voice and says, “if only there was peace on Earth.” Then she goes driving off in her 100,000 H2 Hummer that could have saved the lives of 50 starving children in South America. Yeah, you’re a real bleeding heart you fucking bitch. How about making some sacrifices to actually help people rather than just sitting around and talking about it in order to inflate some non-existent self-image.

Christmas, the holiday where you show your love for people by buying them a bunch of shit that they don’t need. I wonder how much of the American economy actually relies on Christmas. Every time I drive around a town in America and I see houses with stupid Christmas lights, I wonder how many people they could have saved with the money it cost to buy those lights and the cost of the electricity to light them. Every time I see some horrible “dancing Santa” in the department store window, I wonder how many children were exiled to die of starvation so that the horrific monstrosity could be built. And the worst of it is, you can’t use the same cheap plastic, crappy decorations every year, you have to buy new ones so that more money can be spent and wasted and tossed down the toilet.

Maybe the genius who might have discovered a cure for cancer died because we decided to spend our limited resources on silly decorations, maybe the guy who would have figured out cold fusion never did so because he never got an education.

The thing is, I’m not saying that you can’t celebrate. The thing that pisses me off is that people seem to think that spending a ridiculous amount of money is PART of the holiday. It ISN’T. If you want to decorate your house, make Santa faces out of construction paper and cotton. Make strings of popcorn and cranberries. I don’t know, be creative, do something with the FAMILY. Don’t just hop in the Suburban and drive down to Wal-Mart and slap down your credit card for another $500 dollar purchase and then think of yourself as “festive.”

But our society has cleverly been reprogrammed over the last few decades to think of things like popcorn strings as “poor.” And nobody wants to be considered “poor” in the united states. You might as well be considered “made of shit.” The one that really cracks me up is that it’s gotten to the point where people have been conditioned to see expensive junk made out of plastic as somehow better than cast-iron or tin ornaments from bygone eras that last forever. This mental reprogramming is completely the fault of modern corporations that know they can’t make stuff that lasts forever because then they wouldn’t be able to sell the same crap the next year.

I bet you can go into an attic right now and find some of your great-grandparents toys. Trains made out of iron that you have a hard time lifting and the like. Do you seriously think any of your toys are going to still be around in a hundred years? NO! Just the fact that some corporation realized that human beings were stupid enough to actually be conditioned to spend more money on something that is of inferior quality is completely staggering. The fact that they’d actually impose this conditioning on our society for the sake of their own profit is criminal.

Corporations seem to corrupt anything they put there hands on, even ancient icons. Have you ever seen that image of Santa happily holding a Coke? They should make crap like that illegal. Basically the Coca-cola company is taking everything that Santa Claus stands for, all the hundred of years that his face was used as a symbol of happiness and generosity, they’re taking this hard-earned image and basically robbing it and applying it to themselves. I think that’s bullshit. Corporate sponsorship does not buy you icon status.

Do you think people would get pissed off if I did something similar? The Death Pestilence home page, brought to you by Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Gandhi. Yeah, people would probably throw a fit if I did that. Fucking hypocrites. It’s a lot easier to get pissed off and come after me than it is to go after Coca-cola. But let it be known that the precedent for prostituting iconic images for personal or corporate gain has been firmly established in America and nobody can justify blaming you if you do the same. But they will, because corporations just assume that different rules apply to them than anybody else.

Fa-la-la, what the hell does that mean anyway?

The End

An Update of an Old Christmas Favorite

Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer
Was excluded and humilated because he was different
All of the other reindeer called him a freak
And laughed at his deformity
And none of the girl reindeer would give him the time of day

Then one foggy Christmas eve
Santa saw that Rudolph's condition could be of some use to him
So he exploited Rudolph for his own personal gain

Suddenly Rudolph was an "acceptable" freak
And the girl reindeer lined up to give him sensual massages
Too bad for Rudolph's brother Gandorph who had down's syndrome
And was the only friend Rudolph had when he was exculded
Now Gandorph was left to play by himself as Rudolph enjoyed his super-star status

Rudolph enjoyed his invitation to play reindeer games
And gleefully chased Gandorph around the north pole throwing pieces of rock and hard coal at his unfortunate brother
Even in the dark, when the light from Rudolph's nose
Could flush Gandorph from his hiding place