I love Christmas!!!!!!!!! It's the best thing that ever existed. None of this "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons's Greetings" nonsense. I hope your holidays are happy too: summer holidays, Easter holidays, Halloween, even Labor Day (what is Labor Day anyway??? ... I just looked it up. It's in honor of "labor" or working people. So not for couch potatoes - that's a different holiday). And I'm glad the season is polite enough to give me its greetings but when the twinkling lights are turned on because actually they've been up all year, and bizarrely we start chopping down trees to put them in our house because I guess it's not enough that they stay outside and our house plants just aren't cutting it, I preserve the right to hear Merry Christmas or even Happy Christmas if you are British and weird. When I see or hear Happy Holidays all I see is the oppression of my freedom as a Christmasian, regardless of my beliefs. And when I hear someone say "Happy Holidays you wonderful person!" (which happens quite a lot) I want to say, "Sorry? I didn't catch that. I think you meant to say Merry Christmas but forgot what it was called?" or "Don't be afraid! You are free to speak it's name!" I refuse to acknowledge that it has anything to do with religious differences (which it does, a lot) and I doubt whether on Christmas morning the children of those politically correct parents are going to want very much to say, "It's the Season! Yay!" when all the other kids are saying, "It's Christmas! Hip-hip-hoorayray!"There are a lot of humbugs in this world, and I think those humbugs are the real ones fighting for "Happy Holidays." And I think it comes down to one thing: they did not get the Easy-Bake Oven we all wanted (and no, despite what you may think would be totally logical, this particular theory can't be substituted with any other toy, except maybe the White Ranger from Power Rangers). Well neither did I, and I really wanted one; in fact, I still do. I think I would be a much better baker if I had used an easy-bake oven as a child, also if I used it currently. I also think it's pretty heartless of my parents not to have gotten their aspiring baker what would most definitely further her chances in the baking profession. You see, in grade four I wanted to be a baker, based solely on the desire to twirl around pizza dough in the air and eat cookies all day. Maybe my parents didn't want to encourage that profession. Although this has nothing to do with Christmas, I also wanted to be a painter. All the other kids were like, "I'm gonna be a firefighter when I grow up!" and their parents were like, "What a noble profession my kid is aspiring for! I'm so proud!" When I wrote "painter" next to the line "What I want to be when I grow up," I wasn't talking about canvases. I was talking about walls. I must have seen someone painting a wall with a roller and thought, "Ooh, that looks fun." However, I doubt whether my parents made this clarification if anyone asked what their child wanted to be when she grew up. While painting walls would be my main source of income, I also wanted to own a horse ranch when I grew up and I continually asked for a pony. Let me tell you, I had serious plans for that pony. How much could they be anyway? I'm sure my parents could have made a down-payment. After that all you had to do was put it in a stall and feed it hay, which is just grass, which there is a lot of. And then it would become your very own TRANSPORTATION! It pays for itself! There is some mysterious attraction little girls have to horses that I think has a lot to do with those never-ending series of horse books I could never catch up with. At my school it was the Thoroughbred series and there were like 70 books. Ridiculous. But my parents obviously didn't want to support that ambition either because I never got a pony, so that's another profession killed by my parents, and you can be sure I will hold it against them for the rest of my life. But hate Christmas because of it? Not if I have any morsel of life left in my soul.
That's what it comes down to, having a morsel of life in your soul. If you do, you can love Christmas for all that it stands for, no matter the circumstances or the scarring past experiences you might have had. But I am sorry that no one showed you the true meaning of Christmas. Telling you is not the same as putting it into action but let me tell you anyway. Christmas is a celeberation of life, love, family, joy, pastry, children, wonder, beauty, presents, charity, kindness, good will towards men (and women, and children, and animals), harmony, Japanese oranges, peace, hope, music, light, stockings, fellowship (which includes eating food with other people) and, well, all manner of good things. If you hate these things there is something very messed up inside you and you should talk it out. Probably with your mother (or father, depending on who is a better listener and who you most need confirmation from of their unconditional love). For me, Christmas means so much more than just those things. It means God did the unthinkable because He loves us beyond anything we could imagine. It means miracles. But if you hate Christmas you have most likely mistaken fake Christmas for real Christmas, which is highly understandable so don't beat yourself up about it. Real Christmas can't be tainted by fake Christmas. Fake Christmas looks like this: greed, all-consuming consumerism, time you don't want to spend with family you dislike, gluttony, gross food which by the way doesn't always stop gluttony, annoying/overplayed Christmas carols in shopping malls, debt or impractical spending that usually also happens inside shopping malls that are playing annoying Christmas carols, busyness both at home and work, in shopping malls, on the road, which stresses you out and makes you utter profanities against your will, and the corruption of your childhood innocence when at the age of seven you saw Santa in a fat suit uttering his own profanities. These evil things, including the fakeness of the mall santas, should not transfer over to Christmas as a whole, or to the fakeness of the real Santa Claus either (who, in case you were misled on this too, does exist).
This just in: Good news! You can have Jesus and Santa too! In fact, one of the most probable origins of Santa Claus comes from Saint Nicholas, a devoted Christian who gave gifts to the poor. I just want to make this clear, Jesus is not Santa Claus, but He's a lot like Santa Claus, only, of course, totally incomparable. And Santa Claus is definitely not Jesus. Santa fosters important imagination in children which I am all about, and yes he might give you presents, but Santa can't save you, unless you are choking on a cookie on Christmas Eve and Santa comes down the chimney and does the Heimlich. But if we are really being politically correct, Father Christmas should be Jesus, not Santa. I mean He's kind of the reason Christmas exists.
I hope that this post has initiated many intellectual conversations between Christmas-lovers and haters, got the Christmas-haters reunited with their parents for a good, long chat (culminating in a hug), and reminded the strays what real Christmas is really about. It is up to us to fight fake Christmas in an ultimate-fighting death match, and we will win, but only if we have Santa and Jesus on our side. This is my argument and I'm sticking to it, unless you have a better one in which case I will take yours into consideration and make an educated decision that I think is best for my psychological health.
P.S. There is an important poll at the bottom of this page that I will be submitting to WWF (World Wildlife Foundation, not the wrestling league; get with the times, that's WWE now), for the furthering of animal research.
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