Miriam Doerr | Dreamstime.com
I am so filled with holiday spirit and good cheer I could just explode. I so love the Christmas holidays. I particularly love shopping malls and big-box stores. I love the thought of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all of the other opportunities to get great deals on things that neither I nor anyone else really needs. But it’s the game that counts. It’s that thrill of putting down the turkey drumstick and racing immediately after Thanksgiving dinner to one of the malls or big stores to shop. Camping out for a day or two in the parking lot of said retailers? Even better. I LOVE that! I love the lines of people and the stampedes that take place when they blow the horn to let shoppers know that it’s time to fight each other for the newest Xbox or Star Wars-themed merchandise of varying kinds. It is so thrilling and heartwarming.
Oh, and I just can’t get enough of Christmas music and television commercials. I live for that. I love the sounds of bells jingling and crooners crooning and whistling the holiday classics. It’s just so joyous. It’s downright rapturous. Oh, and Christmas movies. God, I live for those too. Especially new ones that blend humor and drama and romance and cute dogs and lots of holiday whimsy. I am nothing less than a big sucker for Christmas movies with lots of holiday whimsy. Can’t get enough of that.
The best type of holiday movie whimsy to me is when older, divorced men and women find unexpected love during the holidays and their families meet and there’s a lot of gosh darn, good old holiday merriment with a couple of the family members being a little eccentric and the cute dog eats the turkey or the ham from the holiday table. Hollywood could crank out a million of those every Christmas, and it still wouldn’t be enough for me.
Oh, and the Christmas DECORATIONS. This is perhaps the best aspect of all during the 12 beautiful days of Christmas. I’m not talking here about just lights, either. Sure, Christmas lights are more than awesome. When I drive by really big houses in really nice neighborhoods and the lovely new homes are completely covered in blinking lights and there’s a Santa and his sleigh and reindeer in light on the roof, I just get a warm feeling all inside me. It makes me so happy to see a display like that because you know someone had to put a lot of thought and work into creating something that majestically gorgeous.
I also like the vignette decorations, like the nativity scene with the baby Jesus and Joseph and Mary and the camels and the manger and all that. It’s so cheerful and nostalgic and wonderful. It just makes me want to sit around a warm fire with the people I love, drinking eggnog and sharing memories from Christmases past. Like the time Uncle Buddy got out of prison just in time to celebrate Christmas with his family — well, the members of the family who lived in the county into which he was released after doing time for aggravated assault because he was still on parole and couldn’t leave that county. It didn’t really matter though, because most of the whores he hung around with all lived in the county, too, and they had plenty of drug-dealer connections without having to steal another car and go to a different county to get the Christmas crystal meth. There were plenty of local convenience stores to rob to get the cash to pay the guy at the meth lab.
And Uncle Buddy would tell us all sorts of wonderful stories about celebrating Christmas in the state penitentiary with all of his Aryan brothers and how he was always married in prison to the man with the most cigarettes. And since it was just as easy to get drugs in prison as it was on the outside, if not easier, he and the brotherhood never had to worry much about spending Christmas without heroin. They could just attack and gang-bang any of the drug dealers in there and get their drugs and celebrate the night away.
Of course, it was harder for them to get the Christmas lights and decorations, since they didn’t carry those in the prison commissary. They had to bribe the guards to bring those in under the cover of night. Well, they didn’t so much bribe them as they did threaten them with having associates on the outside murder their children on Christmas day if they didn’t get them the lights and decorations so they could spend Christmas Eve smoking crack in their cells and then making fake reindeer antlers to wear to the chow hall.
I don’t know why those stories warm my heart so during the holiday season but they really, really do. In fact, I feel like going Christmas shopping right now and getting what I heard on the news the other day is the most popular gift this year: an assault rifle. They’re on sale, you can get them at the gun shows without a background check, and everybody needs one. What’s the downside to that? So Merry Christmas, you hear?
