My wife agrees and is totally down. We are going to run a holiday train on Christmas and totally fuck its junk up. When you see Christmas in the morning and it’s kinda walking weird, maybe looking a little sore, that was me and my wife. We were the ones who fucked Christmas so hard.
I love you Christmas, you dirty little whore. I know you only come once a year so I’m gonna make you come like you’ve never come before. You can be as loud as you want, you can scratch, you can claw, you can even pull my hair I don’t care. This year it’s all about you Christmas. We can try anything you want. You don’t even have to come down the chimney like you usually do.
All right, seriously though, I do really love Christmas. And I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone’s sensibilities with all this x-rated Christmas talk. I guess in a way I’m trying to make a point. Christmas seems to have gone so far off the tracks that you very well might find it starring in some seedy face fucking porno. I mean, am I wrong? Hasn’t Christmas just become some sort of orgy of consumerism? Hasn’t the whole point of the holiday become some kind of macro-economic guilt trip aimed at herding us into the stores so that we can “rescue” our economy? Buy, buy, buy. Save, save, save. Now, now, now. You know you want it! Yeah, that’s right, give it to me, ew baby, ew baby, yeah, like that, with the charge card, yeah, I can feel it getting bigger, max it out, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Disgusting isn’t it? Well, I for one am just tired of it. It doesn’t get me off anymore. The catalogue porn, the window shopping, the mall, all the plastic Christmas cheer, it’s all a big turn off. I mean if I’m going to be forced into fucking Christmas I’m sure as hell not gonna do it in public. I’m not about humiliating the holiday. I’d want to go some place quiet, put on some mood music, maybe a little jingle bells or noel, maybe Chris G.’s album This Christmas Let’s Get Messed Up, turn down the lights and take things at a slower pace. I’d want it to be tender and meaningful. None of this impersonal wham, bam, thank you ma’am shit that the cheer mongers seem to be pushing. Just another one night stand. Get drunk and fuck something, anything, it doesn’t matter, you won’t remember it in the morning anyway. That’s just not how I roll. I don’t want to regret having sex with Christmas. I don’t want Christmas to regret it either. I want to wake up in the morning and be proud that I invited it over. Hell, I want to make it breakfast. I want to call it again.
But how do we get back to this kind of relationship with Christmas? How do we repair years of abuse and neglect, how do we make Christmas feel special again, pure and virginal? Well for starters we can stop using Christmas as an excuse to slake our perverted little desires to own more shit. Stop buying so much stuff people! I know they say that if we put away our credit cards we’ll wreck the economy. That we have to buy stuff because it’s part of our genetic make-up. And that if we don’t get people presents we’ll look like a cheapskate and a humbug. Well I say fuck what people say. Buying stuff is not the answer to a quality Christmas holiday.
I don’t really know what the answer is. I’m not a Christmas guru, an oracle, a trend setter or anything else, but what I do know is what works for me. This is how I make sweet love to Christmas. First of all I try not to kill too much shit getting my holiday nut. For example my wife and I went to this tree farm in the county and bought this live tree.
I know what you’re thinking, but despite the fact that it looks straight out of the Peanuts’ Christmas Special this tree is gonna be around a lot longer than any of us. We figure it will live in the house till spring, so as not to screw up its equilibrium with a sudden temperature change, and then we’ll keep it on the deck until next year when we’ll have it for our tree again. Cat has named it and everything. She calls it Frosty, but I think it should be called Sharpie, or Prickly, or something like that because this is the pokiest damn tree I’ve ever come across. Maybe it’s because it’s so young that its needles are so sharp, kind of like kittens and puppies, but twice now Frosty has drawn blood.
Honestly we don’t know too much about keeping a Sitka Spruce as an indoor pet but we did a little interweb investigation and it doesn’t seem too hard. It’s not recommended that you keep a tree like this one inside for more than a few days, but we’re going to go against that rule as long as Frosty doesn’t seem to be suffering. I’ve placed his pot inside a bucket that’s got a little water in the bottom so that he can drink what he needs. And I’ve chosen not to put any lights on him because the added warmth would be bad for his needles and his overall well being.
Instead I’ve painstakingly threaded a bunch of popcorn together to make a garland to drape over his branches. I used about three or four tablespoons vegetable oil, about a half a cup of popcorn, and popped it all on the stove top in an eight quart pot with a lid. If you’re going to use popcorn for decorative purposes don’t put any butter or salt on it. I let the popcorn cool for several hours then took this old sewing kit I got from some hotel and went to work. 
I never really noticed before how much individual popcorn kernels resemble octopus but it’s pretty uncanny. Here’s a random gift idea. If you have any Filipino friends or relatives get them a fresh octopus. They’ll be your friend forever I promise.
For gifts this year I’m giving homemade blackberry jam, homebrew, spicy pickled green tomatoes and a few little bottles of booze and some lottery tickets.
Cat spent three days putting together this massive batch of green curry for her gifts, grinding all the ingredients in a mortar. She’s going to get some “real” presents from me too, mostly functional and sensible things, but for the most part my family is just getting food. I don’t know if that makes me seem cheap or if it makes me seem thrifty and thoughtful. I don’t really care. If they don’t want the stuff then I’ll be glad to take it back. In fact I had real difficulty saving these jars of jam (I picked the blackberries after I returned from the Bay), and I’m having trouble parting with them now. No matter how I feel about this stuff I already know what kind of response I’ll get. It’ll be sort of like all the canned salmon and smoked salmon I’ve been giving my parents and brothers all these years. The jars will end up in their cupboard collecting dust, or in my Mom’s case in the back of the fridge with all those tiny forgotten bottles of horseradish sauce. My Mom is paranoid about botulism so she would never store something I’d canned myself in the cupboard where it belongs. She’d rather put it in her refrigerator where it looks like a bomb went off. I’ve cleaned out her fridge on a number of occasions and found food so old that it had grown its own personality. I’ve given up trying to rectify the matter though. I’ve tried to tell her that she should look in the fridge before she goes to the store but that’s a concept she just can’t understand. As a consequence there’s a lot of redundancy, a lot of spoilage and a lot of MIA’s. When Cat and I visit, my Mom goes shopping like she’s going to be feeding the fifth battalion for a month. We’re bombarded by snacking suggestions. Flanked by cookies and surrounded by dips and cheeses. Our meals are like a military parade. One dish after another hits the table in its own fancy bowl or plate, until an assembly the size the Red Army is lying there just challenging you to concur it. I don’t really know who wins these battles but there isn’t any quarter given because there isn’t anywhere in the fridge to put the leftovers.I’m kind of off track here but it’s been that kind of day. My older brother is sitting across from me now holding forth on how global warming is bullshit, my Dad is tinkering with his new flatscreen tv, Cat is knitting her Christmas stocking. My little brother is trying to drink all the Wild Turkey before any of us get any, and my Mom is slaving away in the kitchen nowhere near emancipation. My older brother suggested that I wrap this up by quoting the last paragraph of It’s a Wonderful Life, but I think Cat’s suggestion is much better. She wanted me to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and remind everyone that every time a bell rings an Angel gets fucked in the face.
Merry Christmas everyone. When I sober up I’ll try and add some recipes for the jam and spicy green tomatoes. I’ll also explain how I think my sauerkraut when horribly, horribly wrong.
Now for the booze.
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