Once we stopped leaving rice milk out for Santa and I let go of the child’s belief that receiving presents is a basic and inalienable human right, my interest in Christmas began dropping off sharply until the present day, when my interest in Christmas can be shown in negative numbers.  

As I got older, Christmas seemed less and less important in the general scheme of things. Ice hockey became everything to me, and December is right in the middle of hockey season. The cherished Christmas break was used to play in out-of-state tournaments and camps. More and more I wasn’t home for Christmas and instead of some wrenching loss, Christmas just faded in importance, like it does for many teenagers. We went from our annually purchased fir tree, to an annually assembled white plastic tree and traded in the time-worn glass and wood ornaments for 99-cent glitter balls to which I lovingly taped pictures of Mike Modano and Bobby Orr. The star atop the tree was a Dallas Star (or a Minnesota North Star, if you go back far enough,) and I faithfully updated Modano’s photo at the top each season. And then, eventually, it felt ridiculous to put up this fake tree that we barely even saw or looked at when we were home to see it. My mother more or less asked me “so…are you done with this shit yet?” And I was. It was that simple. We celebrated the holiday on our own terms, and when it no longer felt meaningful to us, we abandoned the pomp and circumstance in favor of celebrations that spoke to our real lives. Our favorite Christmas story changed from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer variety to that of our downstairs neighbor Jack’s unstable sister, who continually broke in to their parent’s home before the holidays, stole various valuables from around the house, and returned them to her parents wrapped as gifts. 

I approach Christmas now much the same way Rev Run did in ‘87 Hollis, Queens when approaching Santa, who’d appeared to him as a shady, bearded weirdo chilling in the park in the middle of the night with his dog (in fact, an ill reindeer): “with my heart full of fear.” It is no surprised that I take issue with the holiday on a religious level, because I do not believe in God, Jesus, or the totally demented virgin birth that Christmas actually celebrates. That being said, beyond my problems with religion in general and Christianity in particular (spoonful of sugar is to medicine, as Santa is to the savior, kiddies!), I obviously support each Christian’s right to party for Jesus the same way I can party for kittens or roller derby or anything I so revere. The point is, this isn’t about religious expression, I am mistrustful of all holidays religious and secular, in general. We bargain with ourselves and each other, that to get the vacation days the working people of the United States keep their noses so faithfully to grindstones for (where they can) we must participate in the seasonally appropriate celebrations. It seems that most holidays in America have lost all personality or divinity and devolved into either “Socially Acceptable 24-hour Mini-Bender” or “Buy, Eat, Sleep Day.”  Every year, we allow specific days to fill us with anxiety, envy, lust, because that’s what our calendar has told us to do - and in the world of holidays, Christmas is definitely BMOC. It is the holiday who spreads itself furthest along the calendar, casually appearing soon after Halloween’s severed heads are removed from windowsills everywhere and loitering till the New Year. Christmas floods us most aggressively with advertising messages. These messages are, of course, telling us how important it is to show love through purchases, but more insidiously they are telling us that if we aren’t sitting down to a monumental meal with at least ten people participating in Good Old Fashioned American Togetherness, we have somehow fundamentally failed as Americans. There is a bizarre accountability we feel to each other to have Christmas plans, to include others in our Christmas plans, that no one should be alone on Christmas. Why not? Why do we have to demand that everyone come to this specific party, no matter the irrelevance to their lives or the inconvenience? If it’s merely a question of gathering together people for whom we care, why can’t that be done without Santa insinuating his fat ass and Rudolph’s disco honker in to the conversation? Secular Christmas is more offensive to me than religious Christmas, representative as it is of bogus traditions we impose on each other as an exorcise in conformity without faith.

As xkcd.com so astutely points out in the comic “Tradition,” the most popular and enduring Christmas songs were written in the 1950’s. As we move further and further away from the middle of the last century, asking the tiny, artificially intelligent computers in our pockets to find us a goose to cook (just kidding, no one does this) or gift suggestions for tech lovers under $100, we cling to songs like Sleigh Ride, Blue Christmas, and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus to “carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers’ childhoods.” American vanity unflaggingly harkens back to the Greatest Generation and their children, despite our complete disconnection with them in day-to-day life. They were the last time we got to think of ourselves as a strong and heroic people, essential in our goodness, fighting together against a plainly evil opponent. We re-stage their innocent, white images of laden Christmas tables to make us feel ourselves wholesome and prosperous in times that are not at all either of those things. Maybe this gross pantomime is more evidently ridiculous in New York City than it is in other parts of the country. In a city with such financial disparity, where the endlessly wealthy and the dirt-poor can eye each other uneasily in the same train car (again, just kidding here, the endlessly wealthy would just take cars), we watch the storefronts of our beefy retail districts pour insane budgets into making the largest possible holiday spectacle so the cockles of your heart will be warmed just enough to get your wallet open. Run D.M.C. knew this in 1992, when in Christmas Is they asked us to “think a little about people minus money” and “give up the dough on Christmas, yo.” They kept up their homegrown Hollis cheer, yet couldn’t help but ask “I’m from the ghetto, does this mean I get no presents beneath my tree? I wrote my list, I made my wish, is this what Christmas means to me?” There are so many parts of Christmas that are inaccessible to the financially insolvent or struggling. Christmas has always had some notion of Christian charity embedded, as evidenced by the hollering, bell-ringing, LGBTQ-hating soldiers of the Salvation Army. It becomes farcical to consider individual charities as our country’s middle-class shrivels and more and more “regular” people find themselves and their families wanting in a serious way, year-round. People flock to intensely commercialized displays, jostling to get a juicier eyeful of a tree that’s been alive possibly longer than they have, cut down and tarted up to die publicly for our enjoyment.  The Tree in Rockefeller Center, itself a nod to the 1950s when the tree’s lighting was first nationally televised, stands as an impressive 75-90 foot monument to seasonal excess and its fickle, transitory joy that I just cannot get down with. I much prefer the sweet, crooked little retard tree that stood in the Tompkins Square Park of my youth, rooted in the ground year-round, of modest hight and decoration. Enjoy your actual life, the one you live in every day, don’t dress up in a temporary, unknowable fiction to exist in only at the end of a miserable year.

More than any other holiday, Christmas is supposed to be the most magical. People talk about the “magic of Christmas” and how they look forward to it every year. On the one hand, I can understand this, because I loved the season so well as a child. On the other hand, when I hear adults go on and on about the magic of Christmas, my hateful brainstem is screaming “grow the fuck up!” Oh, you already got your tree in November because it makes the house more magical? You listen to Christmas music year-round to keep that magic in your life? Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you, because you are ruining the magic for the rest of us. If Christmas could confine itself to maybe a magical week of escape at the end of December, perhaps we could all enjoy it instead of losing an opportunity for general seasonal warmth to an phalanx of grow’ed up seven year olds. I love the boundless imagination of childhood, and I think too often we let ourselves be robbed of real magic in life by agreeing that we can’t embrace silliness and wonder. However, to look past all that is unfair, cloying, and ugly about Christmas in 2011 on a mindless mission for mid-century holiday magic is too naive and childish for me to take you seriously as an adult. For a neat little illustration, let’s look to AORBS, The Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas, “an international association of real bearded gentlemen dedicated to the joy of being Santa.” Even these men, who have dedicated their lives to maintaining the joy and magic of Christmas are not above the petty, political squabbling of everyday life, plagued by controversy in their leadership that came to blows and national coverage.

While I was recording my Marky Mark radio show, my brother was watching basketball on a black and white portable tv and not letting me come up the latter to his nest-like lofted room. He will be having a daughter soon. I’m beyond excited to be someone’s weird aunt and to show this little girl where real magic exists in life, in art, in the natural world. Without even meeting her, I know she will be lovely and adorable and implicitly deserving of presents, which are her rightful salary as a small child. Without a doubt, the greatest gift I’ve ever been giving is having seen people on the Lower East Side living life by their own terms, finding happiness and meaning in a life without money and without conformity. I hope she’ll be able to delight in Christmas lights without being dragged into the what-have-you-bought-for-me-lately holiday hysteria. And I should end by saying that in the face of my hated for Christmas, I do love me some Christmas lights. This is a holiday practice I still wholeheartedly support, even if it does make me wonder how some of the more enthusiastic participants get their electric bills paid for the month. In much the same way that psychedelic Hindu religious iconography visually communicates real religious ecstasy to my eyebrain, these displays communicate a kind of seasonal enthusiasm that no other holiday decoration quite matches. The level of detail put in to some people’s Christmas lights is truly impressive and sometimes mind-boggling - when the lights are successfully timed to music, when there are life-sized animatronic reindeer, when (as on my current Brooklyn street) there is a six foot high, rotating inflatable snow-globe with fluffy snowflakes swirling around inflatable Santa as he slowly spins. Or, even better, the deflated Christmas inflatable. Maybe people do this to conserve energy during off-peak viewing hours, but nothing puts a smile on my facequite like the sight of a flaccid Frosty the Snowman or bugle-totting angel hanging gracelessly over the edge of some dork’s roof like a festive used condom or melting into a shame puddle on the lawn. Back in my Christmas glory days, clown-car’d together in my aunt’s small four-door, we would ooh and ahh together as my Grandma spat “That’s disgusting!” at anything more showy than white lights and a candle in the window. One notable year, as we snaked slowly around the neighborhood, a poorly-chosen dinner of neon pink lobster bisque at a 22nd Avenue diner came back up our small throats, froze brightly to the sides of the car, and painted the seats pink as we spilled out of the car and on to the sidewalk in front of one of the more dignified displays. White wireframe reindeer pulled a wireframe sleigh, all wrapped in white lights, and shining white Santa’s wireframe arm waved back and forth in greeting to us as we scream-danced in vomit disgust before him. My cousin Charlie threw his head back and repeatedly screamed SANTA HAS A GUN, SANTA HAS A GUN.