Today I’d like to talk to you about the joys of Christmas and the holiday season in general. Being a non-social person from birth, I was pretty much over the holiday by the time I was 13 or so. I moved out when I was 20 and promptly got a job in retail, thereby giving me an excellent reason not to return to my family’s house for eight wonderful holiday seasons. I now have a job that isn’t retail and therefore this year I had no acceptable reason to stay home. [”I don’t believe in your god, his son–who would’ve been born in the summer FYI–or slavering consumerism as a placeholder for love.” Isn’t acceptable to most families, including mine.]

So I dragged my poor husband the three hour drive up to deal with my family. Never again, kids. Humans are quite adaptable, you know. Particularly when the adaptation is to a life that suits a you just fine–for example, neither my husband nor myself can stand being around lots of noise, people or a bunch of physical affection and we haven’t had to put up with those things for many months now so being forced back into the box of trying to tolerate loud people, hugs and fairy tales had us both climbing the walls. We came home after roughly eighteen hours in their presence and slept for the better part of twenty-four hours. Our dog had stayed with the canine equivalent of my family–several loud, rambunctious dogs–and she fell asleep as soon as we got into the Jeep. We got home, she got on the sofa and slept almost a day. People exhaust all of us.

Then I saw this column on the BBC about the statistical rise of drinking and murder (and interestingly, church attendance) during December. “While people are less inclined to take their own lives in the festive season, they are more likely to kill others.” They don’t specify if the people killed share DNA with their murderers, but I would bet they do.

So. Dealing with family leads people to drink and possibly murder those family members. I’m guessing the church attendance is along the lines of: “Look, god, I had to do it. Otherwise she wasn’t ever going to shut up.” Or “Please, Jesus, help me keep from killing these idiots.”
Christmas is bad for your health. Besides being a giant lie. For these reasons it should be cancelled.

[This is a re-post from Christmas 2007, but remains applicable]