Christmas Goblin

[Forty-five minutes]

It's just past noon on Christmas Eve and there is a sweet sunny chill in Little Rock, clear blue skies above the dun, broom-bristle grass of Arkansas winter. I am sitting in my apartment about to drive to my parents' house, some two hours west from here. I am sitting in my apartment with hate in my heart.

This is the year that I hate Christmas. I hate the sentiments, the fellowship and goodwill and family togetherness. For some of us, the idea of Christmasy family togetherness is as foreign a concept as a burqa. I hate the dichotomy Christmas creates: the warm cozy womb of the stocking world on the inside, the frostbitten blue fingers grubbing at the glass from the outside. I hate the way Christmas hijacks December so completely that for the duration of the month, the holiday seems like the axis upon which the entire calendar year turns. I guess if I had to make an argument for my sentiments, I'd say that I hate the smugness of Christmas. Satan was revolting against smugness as much as anything else (and the Grinch is just a stand-in for Satan, the entire tale being a twisted and heretical parable of universal reconciliation).

But smugness is usually (always?) an illusion sprung from the eye of the envious. The happy bestockinged family isn't smug on their own; their smugness only springs into being when observed by window goblins like myself. Smugness, like certain quantum events, doesn't exist without someone to observe it happening. A hermit in the woods can't be smug -- no matter how self-satisfied his stroll to his pious primitive toilet, no matter how saccharine his contented whistling through his licey beard. The joke is always on the devil.

I hate Christmas for the only reason anyone hates anything, which is envy and pride and covetousness, and the second-order emotions that spring from them: contempt and self-loathing and revulsion and bewilderment and despair. Yes, I hate Christmas this year, and yes, that makes me a bad person. Which makes me resent it twice as much, because I don't particularly want yet another reminder that I am a bad person alone in a cold and ever-shrinking world. It makes me want to go back to school and study design and marketing so that I can concoct consumer hysterias around horrible toys, creating ad campaigns so deviously hypnotic they fuel frenzied crowds of shoppers into Black Friday stampedes with death tolls reaching into the tens of thousands.

It wasn't always so, and I hope it will not always be so in the future, but this year I am a hater. But I am not particularly proud of the fact. If I'm not fighting it, I'm at least not embracing it. I try my best to cover my snarling face with a quilt, like a good child, so that we can all have fun or at least not be shitty to each other. As the narrator says in one of my favorite books of all time, in what seems to me nowadays the only statement in the human world with the remotest claim of moral truth to it, "the crime that is latent in us we must inflict upon ourselves, not on others."

And on you, now that you've read this. Merry Christmas! Actually, I feel much better now.