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Bah, Humbug and the Eternal Return
Hating Christmas in too many words
Christmas is canceled
Fine by me. I never liked it anyway.
It’s just a rerun. A retread of the same tired tropes, the kind of thing I despise in art and in thinking. How many more years do we have to do the same thing? How many more times am I going to have to listen to Bing Crosby and John Lennon and Wham! against my will?
I can imagine lying wasted and weak in some future hospital bed, listening to a beeping machine grimly counting heartbeats from an ever-shrinking pool and consoling myself in the scowling face of a terminal diagnosis with the knowledge that at least I’ll never have to listen to Do They Know It’s Christmas? ever again. Yes, George. They know it’s Christmas. They just don’t give a shit.
My hatred for Christmas is well established. My wife tentatively puts up a modest tree and hangs a few decorations anyway. Every year it’s different, but every year it’s the same.
That’s the idea, anyway. That by repeating the same empty rituals, by singing the same songs and eating the same foods, we can jam a stick in the spokes of time and stop its mad rush. But all it really does is remind us how unstoppable it all is. Another trip around the sun. Once again, John Lennon’s…