Oh Goody, It's Frickin' Christmas Time Again

Oh goody, it's frickin' Christmas again. That's fantastic. So I get to climb up to where the goddamn spiders are and drag out the forty-six giant plastic chests from the attic again. Once the coughing fit stops from all the dust and I pick all the fiberglass insulation off of myself (no, those little splinters don't itch for more than a day or so, so don't worry about it, it's all good. I'm fine.) then I can start decorating for this fantastic holiday. Oh yeah!

So first, I get to pull out the ladder, the big one for the roof, not that little creaky wooden pull-down thing I had to perch on like an f-ing mountain goat to get that crap out of the attic, I mean the big ladder. The one that bows in the middle and wobbles like a 7.5 on the Richter scale when my fat, beer-swilling ass climbs up on it. Yeah, that one. So I get to climb up there and hang the frickin' lights all around the house so that everyone in the neighborhood knows I'm not a Christmas Nazi and can all feel my bubbling holiday joy no matter how high my utilities bill will be. My kids, all teens, don't even go out and look anymore, and if I make them -- essentially drag them out there by their hair and say, "Look at the pretty lights you little bastards, I'm doing this for you," -- they just go, "Yeah, that's great dad," and go back inside

So then comes the trip to the tree farm. Yes, tree farm, because apparently buying a tree from the Boy Scouts lot or the Church of Whoever on some corner STILL isn't good enough. So, with gas at $74 bucks a gallon, we take our big old Chevy up into the friggin' deep Sierras to waylay some poor pine tree that was just sitting there minding its own business all year. Sayonara, Doug the Fir, hope you didn't have plans for New Year's.

Then, after being stabbed and beaten by its poison tipped needles getting it on and off the truck (not to mention how long it takes to get that goddamn chainsaw started every year, being as how cutting down this frickin' tree is the only time I use a chainsaw at all, ever... although, my wife sniping last year about how I scratched the paint on her truck loading up the tree did give me an idea for another use for my chainsaw this year if she starts that crap again...) I then get the tree inside the house so the kiddies (I did mention they're all teenagers now, right? And you realize that teenagers hate everything and that everything sucks outside the world of their friends, music and video games. You realize that right? Because they do.). So I get it inside so the kiddies can joyously tell me in the spirit of the holidays that "This sucks" or "I have homework" (the first time they admit that all year mind you) and disappear, leaving me and my wife to finish decorating the tree by ourselves. WTF? Whose f-ing holiday is this anyway? Someone told me this crap is for the kids.

So, once the tree decorations are all up, and after we've moved all the furniture away from the walls and pulled the chairs out from under the formal table so that we can sweep up all the glass from the two ornaments that fell and broke sending shards flying everywhere, I get to open up the bags where the tree lights are, and discover, yet again, that apparently while man can send robot landers to Mars, which is more than 200 million miles away, and keep them running for more than 5 years, he is NOT capable of making a strand of Christmas tree lights that can work for two consecutive holidays.

Now, because I am "the man" it is my duty to go back to F-ing Home Depot and buy yet another batch of Christmas lights from those bastards, and even as I hand them my money, again, I know full well that I will be back again next year. I even have the thought that I should buy enough for next year just so I can spare myself this trip in the future, but I also know that the evil sons of bitches who make the lights put the self-destruct timers in the lights to go off regardless of whether they are purchased or not - they know some people will try my idea, and they plan ahead (this kind of preparation is how they maintain their status as "evil sons of bitches" to begin with, a distinction of which they are clearly proud.)

So, once working lights are finally on the tree, and after I receive several more doses of poison-tipped pine-needle stabs into my forearm skin, the task is done. (Notice I don't even include mention of how my wife will stand there with her hands-on-hips and critique my ability to position the goddamn star straight on the top of the tree, even though that tip portion the treetop isn't straight and hasn't been straight on any pine tree in the last nine million years, making it physically impossible to have a "straight" star, and completely outside the fact that she insists on buying the biggest fanciest electronic motorized "star" dolls with lights and everything else and that weigh 600 pounds and would bend a steel girder much less a quarter inch thick stretch of pine tree tip. Yeah, notice I didn't even mention that? I'm trying to keep this on a pleasant note).

So yeah, lights are up. Let's go shopping.

Ok, I already wrote the mall shopping hub, so I won't go into all of that. Suffice it to say, that the only good thing about going to the mall is looking at cleavage, and let's be honest, Christmas time is not notorious for producing the best weather for clothing conducive to cleavage gazing. So what's at the mall for me? Well, beyond an enormous, Christmas snow covered mountain of money being spent on gifts for people who will go, "Oh, how nice," with that wrinkly face of "Oh look, another box of See's mystery candy" or "Ooooo, candles," there's pretty much nothing.

I mean, I'd say something nice about eggnog, being the fan of booze that I am, but who the hell actually drinks spiked eggnog? Can someone please tell the Christmas Clichés department to stop pimping that idea? I think the last people who actually did that were wearing bear skins and can still be found preserved in ice somewhere.

The only fun part of Christmas for me is buying jewelry for my wife, and maybe lingerie. I already know she won't wear the lingerie, but every few years I take another stab, thinking, you know, maybe the leopard spots will do what the latex and spikes couldn't. I usually end up spending three times more on her than I should (and probably than we do for everyone else combined) to which she says, "Oh, these are pretty," while giving me this look like, "We should have spent this money on the kids."

If I had a dog, I would give him a Christmas kick at that point, which is probably why we don't have one, and is a good thing.

I don't know the words to any Christmas songs, and if I have to hear Bing Crosby sing "White Christmas" one more time, I'm going to buy a dog just so I can kick it.

Other than that, Christmas is great and I hope everyone has an awesome one. Merry Christmas and all that other festive crap.