We're All Doomed: Christmas Forever

Winter holidays are important. Whatever holiday you spend your November and December celebrating, they all kind of attempt to fix the same problem: winter is cold and dark and makes you think about your own mortality. And the efforts taken to fix this problem (resulting with the same solution)? Copious amounts of alcohol and the cooking and eating of large birds. America has Thanksgiving at the end of November and then, according to a 2010 gallup poll, about 95 percent of the population celebrates Christmas in December. That makes for one long month of drinking and eating and passive-aggressively comparing careers with people you went to high school with. And America’s frosty bacchanalia is fueled almost entirely by marketing.

Look, companies are even trying to get Hanukkah in the mix:

Also, if you think that Christmas marketing starts earlier every year there’s a very good chance you’re right, considering this year Christmas ad campaigns started in October. Also, marketing firms slamming together holidays into some kind of cranberry sauce coated nightmare is bound to have an odd effect on how people perceive them.

Let's start with Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a weird holiday, if you really think about it. The story goes we spend the day eating a big meal with our families and listen to our families attempt to have civil and interesting conversations about politics in order to commemorate the day when early American settlers had a big meal with the Native peoples they met. And sure you could be a jerk and bring up the fact that after the pilgrims finished eating dinner with the Native Americans they murdered their men and raped their women and launched a history of bloodshed that doesn't haunt us enough today.

Of course there are more details about Turkey Day that are really strange. For instance, it is most likely based on a tradition started by Spanish settlers sharing a meal of bean soup with with Timucua Indians in 1565. Whoops. Also, it wasn’t made an official holiday until the Civil War. The first national Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1777 by George Washington. In December no less. Finally, a hundred years later Abraham Lincoln declared it the last Thursday in November. Obviously that causes a lot of problems because November can have five Thursdays. Also, no one really adhered much to the nationally recognized day, so Thanksgivings were regionally celebrated throughout the end of November. It was a mess. One of the few things we kept from the post-Lincoln Thanksgiving era were Football rivalries.

Finally (as if you cared, considering Thanksgiving happened last week), Franklin Roosevelt declared it the fourth Thursday in November, and that’s pretty much how Thanksgiving has stayed since then. An arbitrary day in an arbitrary month celebrating a story that never happened for no real reason except as an excuse to get drunk and eat turkey. Which of course leads us to Christmas.

The story of Christmas is, as most know, a Jewish teenager had a virgin birth in a barn and a bunch of Persian kings saw a star over the barn and were like, “whoa, dudes, check out that star, it’s wild.” And then they went over, saw the baby and gave it a bunch of really cool spices. Now every year we reflect by watching a movie about a kid who wants to his parents to give him a rifle on loop for 24 hours. It’s a beautiful thing.

Christmas, as a feast on the 25th of December, dates back to around the year 300. The holiday retained its largely spiritual purpose until the mid-1800s with popularization of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, which is oddly enough considered the watershed moment in Christmas’ existence as a gift-giving consumer-fest.

Nowadays and for as long as anyone can remember consumerism is, naturally, the glue that binds holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving to our vivid culture; and it’s not like the heads of our free-market economy are going to sit down and say, “you know what guys? We really need to tone this stuff down. This is getting a little ridiculous. Maybe we don’t need to create a brand of red and green candy corn to start selling around October 25th.” No, our capitalist society (ew I said “capitalist society”) is going to keep churning out awful Christmas junk, and they’re going to keep on starting earlier and earlier.

We as a culture drop the pretense, admit that we just want to buy junk to give to each other, get loaded, and gorge on food and declare a national start to “winter,” where everyone’s allowed to just consume everything.

Christmas starts on January 2nd, and goes year-round, we become a winter worshipping society of massively obese trolls that cram festive cakes and pies into our insatiable mouths, forever hammered on wine and nog, buying each other meaningless knickknacks. The irony will be completely lost on us as global warming, unchecked, ramps up, and winter disappears forever. We’ll all become gluttonous Santa monsters, feasting on sweets until we all die of heart disease.

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