To be honest, I really hate the Christmas holidays. I actually have a long laundry list of complaints about the season, and this year has just been made a winner in my books.

First off, I have a December birthday which means that nearly all of my friends and almost all of my co-workers forget it because they&#039re too busy thinking about Christmas or finals. This year was actually really stellar in that most of my friends remembered either during the week of my birthday or within a couple weeks after (ahem, Nick!) So that&#039s not why this Christmas sucks so bad.

Secondly, I myself am a college student meaning that I have to worry about finals and term papers right before Christmas. This means that I have that much less time to think about shopping or finishing up all those cutsey little crafts that I prefer to make for people rather than have to come up with something to buy for them. Less time shopping means less time thinking about it which is quite stressful especially when you&#039re buying for family members who are bizarre to buy for. It also means less time wrapping which Kitty doesn&#039t make any easier to begin with what with her prediliction for sitting on paper and eating ribbons.

Thirdly, I work on campus and Ian works at Wal-Mart. For those of you who don&#039t have minimum wage jobs or who haven&#039t had one in a long time, you probably don&#039t understand just how little they pay especially considering that rent, bills, groceries, gas, and every other little thing has to come out of that salary. Luckily, Ian gets paid a little better than minimum wage, and I actually get about fifty cents more than that myself, so we&#039re a little better off than people who just get minimum wage. However, it&#039s not great, and Christmas shopping is a HUGE expense both in presents and in gas driving back to the parents&#039 places for a night. Then we get to turn right around and pay rent on the first. Dippy. Mind you, I love getting things for people; I just feel bad that we can&#039t do more.

Fourthly, I hate snow. Everyone talks about having a beautiful white Christmas and they play that goddamned Bing Crosby song a hundred times a day just begging for the clouds to open up and shit a bunch of cold white crap all over the place. I hate snow. I&#039m not even going to try to describe how much I hate snow because it would take far too long. Any holiday which is encumbered by the additional burden of heaping mounds of dangerous white spooge is automatically on my shit list.

Fifthly, I&#039m not religious. No matter how hard I try to make sure my gifts aren&#039t religious in nature (though I did bend my rules to get Leslie a stamp that read &#034Blessed&#034 because it came with two others) and no matter how hard I try to keep from letting the &#034Oh Holy Crap&#034 stuff get to me, it never seems to work. I know it&#039s a fucking fantasy to imagine that maybe for one year I won&#039t have to listen to how blessed everyone&#039s feeling or how their god is so good to them because we&#039re all here together or something along those lines, but for some odd reason I keep hoping that I won&#039t have to have someone&#039s Jesus shoved up my ass for several hours straight. We live in a Christian society (and I&#039ll take a pickaxe to anyone&#039s head who tries to say we don&#039t) and this is the biggest holiday for them despite the fact that logically Easter probably should be bigger because that&#039s when their lord-dude got killed and save all their twitchy little souls, right? Whatever. All I know is that being an athiest at Christmas is hard because I feel like my meer presence is bringing down the happiness level of the smiling Catholics around me, that I&#039m a blight on their holiday, a mold growth on their fruit cake. I&#039m a constant reminder that despite their &#034reason for the season,&#034 there are a few &#034mis-guided souls&#034 out there just being the thorn in the sides of the millions of celebrating Christians. I may be wrong–maybe no one cares about the fact that I&#039m an athiest at Christmas–but I am uncomfortable about it and that is enough to make it bad.

Sixthly, this year sucks extra hard because of this morning. Technically, it&#039s no longer Christmas, just the holiday season, but fuck it if I care about the distinctions right now. Lushbaugh called at eleven this morning, and I answered the phone thinking, &#034Oh, he probably wants to go grocery shopping right now.&#034 No, he was calling because he had gone out to his car and had noticed that the driver-side window of my minivan had been smashed in and that someone had rifled through the glove compartment, leaving it open so the little light inside could possibly destroy my battery as well. Merry Fucking Christmas. We spent a while picking up and sweeping out crumbs of safety glass so that I could safely sit behind the wheel to take her to a car wash where I could vacuum out more of it. I&#039ll be finding glass in there for the rest of the van&#039s life. Some meth-head saw my POS minivan and decided to bust in the window to see if he could get some extra cash for his fucking addiction, and who cares if all he found were some Kleenex, a bunch of old newspapers and an AOL CD? He&#039s gone; there&#039s no finding him, and I&#039m stuck with a very air-conditioned minivan meaning that this cold which I&#039ve had for the past month isn&#039t going to go away any sooner. Lushbaugh called a place here in town to see if they could replace the window, and they said they could get it done by tomorrow afternoon. He drove behind me out on Poplar where I dropped the Mom-mobile off with the key. It isn&#039t going to cost as much as I feared–less than $200–but added to the fact that I and I are both already broke from the stupid holiday season, rent&#039s due Saturday, and I don&#039t get paid this month on the first like I normally do (I usually pay for the rent out of my assistantship stipend), this blows.

To put it mildly, my masochistic/self-destructive streak has really set in, and I just feel like using the broken glass as soap right now to try and clean this holiday off my skin as well as from under it. I&#039m just really not in a good mood, and I probably won&#039t be until all this fucking snow is gone, this fucking season is over, and it&#039s warm and sunny again. Fuck Christmas. I hate this time of year.

Posted: December 27, 2004 at two.