Is It Over Yet?

The week before Christmas is a week of waiting. All the normal processes of the world come to a halt as people abandon their usual posts. No one is ever in their office. The government is preoccupied with last minute business and tactics to stall legislation over a long holiday break. All the TV schedules get fucked up, and they release like 100 great movies to 2 theaters a piece all at once. It's like we're all preparing for this moment, Christmas Eve -> Christmas morning...and then it comes and goes in a few hours. By the time I wake up on Christmas Day, it's all over. Then there's another week of lounging about, winding down, then there's New Year's, and then everything slowly starts up again.

It's at this point - around December 20th - that I lose interest in the whole thing. Working retail, of course, the holidays are a drag because people get frantic around this time of year. Well, okay, that's not fair. There are two distinct types of reactions I have observed among those celebrating Christmas in the weeks before the actual holiday itself.

(1) Actual Goodwill Towards Men

This week, I have had a variety of people do randomly nice things for me for no good reason whatsoever. I helped a guy who brought in a DVD with a busted case, and he gave me $5 just as a gesture of appreciation. The lady who runs the bakery next door brought us over some cupcakes, because I'd written something nice about her store in this blog post, and another customer brought us in a tin of cookies. And even though everyone who knows me is aware of my curmudgeonly Scrooge-dom, I have still receives holiday cards, gifts and wishes from friends and family alike.

In the interest of being fair and balanced, I thought I would mention some of the positive holiday-themed behavioral modifications I have observed. Unfortunately, it's not quite enough to counterbalance my distaste for the second, and more common, Christmas reaction:

(2) Crazed frenetic Yule-themed insanity

These are the people who go about shopping as if it's equally as stressful and tactical as preparing a nuclear arms treaty. You're just fucking shopping, idiot! Calm the hell down! You can spot these people coming a mile away, because they are clutching long, hastily scribbled lists, lumbering forward with a faraway look in their eye and muttering about gift receipts. Also, many of them wear garish, bright, bespeckled holiday-themed sweaters.

Counter-intuitively, considering the supposed joyfullness of the holiday they are currently engaged in celebrating, these people are often rude and discourteous. Many times, they will interrupt you while you are speaking to someone else, or just yell things to you from across the store.

"Hey, do you guys have any of those Fred Astaire box sets yet?"
"I can't hear you, and I'm helping this other customer. Just give me one moment."
"I need one of those Fred Astaire box sets! Do you have any? It's for my elderly grandmother!"
They also request gift-wrapping services, although why anyone would want me to wrap their presents for them is a complete and total fucking mystery. Better to just go to the City Dump, find an old discarded strip of fiberglass insulation and roll your gift up inside it than give it to me to decorate. When I used to work at Barnes & Noble, where we genuinely were asked to wrap Christmas presents, my handiwork would earn looks of scorn and resentment from most customers. Some were offended. And with good cause. It looked like Take Your Autistic One-Armed Daughter to Work Day at Santa's Workshop.

So we'll say that we don't offer gift-wrapping, or even have a single piece of gift-wrap in the store, and those suffering from Christmas-inspired lunacy will get indignant, as if we are dodging our civic duties to package shit up for their friends merely to be annoying.

Sometimes, they'll even ask for a gift bag, which is an intensely stupid invention. It's a little decorative bag that you can just throw a gift inside. Why add this step at all? Is anyone really delighted by festively-decorated bags? And I know the argument for wrapping gifts in the first place - you're showing that you cared enough to make the present look nice. But, with the gift bag, it's already obvious you were too lazy to get gift wrap, scissors and tape, so you just bought a $2 bag and threw some shit in there. So if it's just going to reveal your laziness anyway, why bother with the bag at all? Just give someone a present and openly dare them to be non-appreciative, that's what I say.

Here's my question: what is the big deal? It's just shopping. Get what you have time for and can afford. If you can't afford to get delicious Luxury Wafers for the dudes at the video store, we will forgive you. We like those cookie wafer things with the cream filling inside, but some of us could stand to skip a few in-between meal snacks anyway, if you know what I mean. I just hate to see so many people walking around in such a stupefied daze for 1/12 of the year. There's already enough batshit insane people in Los Angeles the other 11 months, the last thing we need is more of them.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of disliking all things Christmas-y, I don't get the fascination with "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Though I dug the animated Peanuts specials as a kid (and still think "Snoopy Come Home" is a pretty solid kid's movie), I never really got into the Christmas show. It's just not very funny and it's incredibly hokey. I mean, as an 8 year old kid, I knew the thing about Charlie Brown buying the weak little twig tree was cheesy and a desperate attempt at poignancy.

Everybody always goes nuts for the jazz music score, which is fine, but I mean...come on, people...The long sequence about catching snowflakes on your tongue...Charlie Brown directing some lame pageant...Linus getting all Jesus-y at the end? How has this thing endured the decades? Are we so desperate for holiday entertainment that we'll just replay this and that stop-motion "Rudolph" and that retarded 70's "Frosty the Snowman" every year, forever, determined to enjoy ourselves? (You'll notice I left out "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," because it's awesome and I fully encourage its re-airing).

Also, no more holiday sitcom episodes or parody movies that riff on A Christmas Carol, okay? We get it...Miserly guy...Jacob Marley...Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Future...Biggest goose in all of Londontown...Lessons learned, barriers overcome, Christmas spirit embraced...It's a nice story, and Chuckie "The Dick" Dickens would be very pleased that it has endured the test of time. Now let's move on.