But I didn't always hate Christmas. When I was a kid it was magical and rad. I remember lying on my back on the floor in front of the Christmas tree, watching the lights play on the ceiling and feeling warm and hopeful. That same year I had a bad split in my lower lip that was pretty painful for a 5 year old. On Christmas eve i prayed to Jesus to heal it and when I woke up the next morning, it was healed. This was proof of the existence of god to my young mind. Years later, I prayed to god again when i was in the midst of a terrible depression, but I was just left to flap in the wind and pick myself up by my bootstraps. Fuck god.
Perhaps growing up in a dysfunctional family made me hate Christmas. As a young child I loved going to my grandparents. The food was good, there was a fire in the fire place, we were wearing sweaters and then there were the presents. My Grandparents were always generous with the presents. As a teenager, however something had changed in me. I loved my family, but noticed that no one ever "got real" with each other. Everyone wore a facade and conversations bounced off awkward walls and defenses. It seemed to me also, that the presents were given out of obligation. I began to resent the obligation. I never had any money and was never really good at equating my feelings for someone with a material possession. We just gave people we hardly REALLY knew tokens of our affection without knowing if they really wanted or needed them. I always just wished we'd just make dinner, get drunk and have it out with each other. Sometimes "getting real" is painful, but it's worth it in the end. I was always told that presents didn't matter, that I could "just make something". I was trying. I've been trying to make something of myself my whole life. I've been burning the candle at both ends for as long as I an remember, trying not to end up like the average mouth breather....but hey, I love you. Here's some socks. The truth is, I would have traded all the presents in the world just to get real with everyone in my family. For some of them, it's too late now.
My favorite Christmas was my sixteenth. I left my grandparents with some money in my pockets and some new shit and picked up Charlie Wilkinson at his house. We went and picked up Drew who had some weed and drove around smoking out of my new pipe that someone (maybe Nicola?) had given me that had a real chicken's foot on it and listening to Descendent's. We had been trying to figure out how to get some beers when we saw a family broke down on the side of the road in the freezing cold. An older black woman and her two grown sons, and they were a long ways away from a gas station. I stopped to pick them up and all 6 of us somehow piled into my little Honda. After dropping them off at the Exxon, one of the sons asked how he could repay our kindness. I asked him to buy us beers and I saw him look at us, obviously underage and chew on this thought for a while. He finally went in and bought us 6 quarts of Old English or some nasty shit like we used to drink. All we needed now was a place to drink them....Drew and I had gone to St. Louis school together although he had been a few grades above me. Since I lived close to there I had discovered at some point that a door to the church was always open. I used to ride my bike there in the middle of the night and just sit in the massive silence and think. I had turned a place where I had bad memories of a bullshit religion shoved down my throat into a place of beauty and meditation. Actually I find something strangely comforting in the Catholic ritual and Icons....but then I think about it and it makes me want to vomit.
We sat up on the choir loft, drinking 40's and smoking for hours. I think we even lit our cigarettes off the candle burning on the altar. You may think I'm going to hell for this, but we were children....closer to god at that time than we've been since. That may have been my last good year for a while....after that the darkness came in to our crew. The Cringe, if you will.
The next night I totaled my car. After I had only been driving for three months. I had Amy and Stacy and Joey in the car and I was being emo and thinking my"woe is me" 16 year old thoughts (this is when I still had feelings, remember) and ran a stop sign. I was looking at the moon. I think it was full and half obscured by clouds when I hear Joey say "car". We got smashed into and spun around and went up into into someones yard and we weren't even a block from my house. We were OK, but Stacy was complaining that she couldn't see well until we figured out that her contact lens had made it into her ear somehow. I had to throw my chicken foot pipe into the gutter before the cops got there. I was sober by the way.
That new years we decided it would be a great idea to eat some acid. I got sick with the flu, was fucked up about a girl and had just wrecked my car. Hey let's freak out. great idea.
But i don't really hate Christmas this year. I think that now it's on my terms, and I don't feel obligated to buy you shit. I'm poor. Deal with it. You don't have to buy me nothing, and don't expect anything in return. i love you, isn't that enough?
Plus, I'm not even a Christian, doesn't that absolve me? My god lives in the trees you cut down and put in your living room. It lives in the land that was cleared for the Wal mart you're shopping at.
If you really must give me something, go plant a Christmas tree and decorate it with the heads of republicans and tea baggers. Or go burn down a Walgreens. it can be our yule log.
Or you can get me this Christmas list:
12 drummers drumming the drum solo from YYZ
11 Piper Perabos
10 Traci lords a peeing
9 strippers dancing
8 maids a milking my prostate
7 Swanson's TV dinners
6 Geezer Butlers
5 Golden Girls DVDs
4 Larry Birds
3 French Maids
2 turtle heads poking out
and Laurie Partridge back in 1973.
YAAAAA!
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