Christmas time has a sense of exclusivity to it. The other eleven months of the year are a free-for-all. Hocus Pocus is a classic movie outside of October. Nothing Valentine’s Day related is condemned to February. You can watch Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day in the heat of summer. Yet don’t hear “Jingle Bells” in July.
I like the holiday season. There’s a reason it’s called the most wonderful time of the year. But it has a short life span.
Every December, a few weeks before Christmas, I load up my car with a month’s worth of clothes, electronics, and movies, checking and re-checking each nook and cranny of my dorm room (do I need to bring my 3DS, or no? How many books can I read in a month?) Then I set off on the wild highways. I plow through the rampant black ice and snow drifts, traveling just slow enough to get some not-so-Minnesota-nice gestures from passing drivers. But I’ve had enough torrid affairs with the ditch to swear off speeding cold turkey.
I like the holiday season. There’s a reason it’s called the most wonderful time of the year. But it has a short life span.
Every December, a few weeks before Christmas, I load up my car with a month’s worth of clothes, electronics, and movies, checking and re-checking each nook and cranny of my dorm room (do I need to bring my 3DS, or no? How many books can I read in a month?) Then I set off on the wild highways. I plow through the rampant black ice and snow drifts, traveling just slow enough to get some not-so-Minnesota-nice gestures from passing drivers. But I’ve had enough torrid affairs with the ditch to swear off speeding cold turkey.
The voyage takes about three hours. An hour in, I’ve shed my coat and my hoodie, and have to arch my back away from the seat so I don’t get sweaty thanks to my overactive heater. About halfway there, I have to stop at the McDonalds off 169 by Coburns to get an iced coffee, otherwise I’ll drift off in this seductive snow globe.
I know I’m two hours in when the music starts skipping. I’d bought one of those little white cassette tapes, like something I imagine them playing in igloos. You slide it into the car’s tape player, and a cord hangs out the right side, like a fishing line hooking my radio. This connects to my iPod.
Without fail, the car catches on to this ruse, this attempt to bring a car made in ’97 into the 21st century. The sound only thrums on the left-side speaker, if at all, and eventually I’m forced to switch to the radio. By this point I’m within range of my favorite back-home station, the one I’ll cling to religiously for the next few weeks.
Then I’m home. The last half-hour of silver slush and rusty rims in Twin Cities traffic floats right by until I’m sitting in my driveway, wondering how long it’s going to take me to lug all of my stuff in.
My hometown seems to have been spared the wind and snow of my college town, like it’s in a pocket universe. It’s a clear, sunny day, enough to melt he paper-thin film of snow left on the driveway. Cold, but that’s refreshing after the stuffy car. Snow towers on all sides from a season of shoveling it into the strip of grass running alongside the driveway. My own little igloo.
My little brother is home, usually. Declan. Sitting in the living room, playing his computer or watching TV. I load up my luggage on the kitchen table. He hears me and I hear him, but we don’t say anything until I head towards the stairs with my first load.
“Hi Declan.”
Or, “What’re you playing?”
Or, “When’s Dad getting home?”
I make a mental note to play something with him later. Cards or video games. Ever since a few years ago, when my dad mentioned over the phone that my little brother was sad when I left, I’d been trying to spend more time with him.
But I am divulging. Let me return to this corruption of the winter holiday. It’s like an untouched village of an indigenous people, strange people, and we blend in without a thought. For the month of December, and however long into January it takes for us to finally take the lights down, they rule our culture with their spirit of peace and goodwill, that spirit which is repugnant to us the rest of the year.
We put up their evergreen trees and burn the yule logs, celebrating the winter solstice and pretending, protesting loudly that it is, in fact, a birthday. This we call Christian. Yet I am no Christian, and I feel no conflict of interest in celebrating this holiday.
Christmas brings motion to our otherwise sterile living room. The white leather couches are rearranged to accommodate the tree, adorned with lights that perform shows for us, flickering this way and that. Late night trips to the kitchen are so much more inviting. There’s always some Christmas music playing along with the lights, or at least, it seems like there is. An iPod hooked up to the speaker system, synced up to a Pandora holiday station.
I feel as though Christmas songs get the brunt of the beating during the warmer months. You can watch a Christmas movie in July if you want to. Those Doctor Who Christmas specials feel strained, re-watching them in March, but not so much that I’d skip them.
But you’ll never hear Christmas-themed songs outside of the holidays. Not one can escape their time of year. Bells simply don’t Jingle outside of winter. Santa Claus is not, in fact, coming to town, how dare you make such a ludicrous claim. Grandma may have been run over by a reindeer, but we’ve all moved on, and you should too.
However, there is one movie that is just as trapped as those songs are: A Christmas Story. Somewhere along the way, a cruel tyrant decided that the thrilling story of Ralphie and his Daisy Red Rider would be played repeatedly. Over and over again. At the height of the season, it will consume us. It used to be a movie that I loved, one of those you’d quote to your friends and take it personally if they didn’t immediately quote back. Something like:
“You’ll shoot your eye out!”
Or, “Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra, ra-ra ra-ra.”
Or, “Oh…. Fudge…”
But it has been decimated. Beating a dead horse doesn’t even begin to describe it. Why does TBS run a 24-hour marathon of just this movie every year on Christmas day?
And you know what’s worse? We watch it. We let it dominate the television in the background. Eventually, we sink into the couch among shreds of wrapping paper, and around the third or fourth time the movie loops back to the beginning, we begin to wonder… why are we watching this?
Yet we don’t change the channel. We just sit there, mesmerized by tradition, blinking in acknowledgment at the famous lines. Somehow, it’s one of the more successful attempts at watching a movie together with my dad. When I try to show him something, he’ll usually fall asleep before the end. If he shows me something, I will usually get bored. But in this mutual, repetitive hell, we’re able to bond over the poor quality and cheesy jokes.
Our conversations are a little easier during the holidays, as well. Even though I know, logically, that there’s more to my pop than boring adult stuff like office supplies and tax forms, there’s still a little kid inside of me that is afraid to bridge the gap, lest I catch some of the responsibility of age.
It’s always: “How are your classes going?”
Or, “Is your car still running okay?”
Or the ever popular, “What’s new?”
Yet over break, we manage to have some pretty good talks. I don’t have to strain mightily to tell him how things are going. We’ll chat about politics, about stuff going on in the family, and on rare occasions we might marathon a show on Netflix that happens to catch both of our interests. Breaking Bad is a gift for our relationship.
New Years is the turning point, when Christmas stops being cute. Your neighbor’s extravagant lawn decorations are just an annoyance. Depending on how much you procrastinate, you’ll drag the shedding Christmas tree to the fire pit between January and March.
Maybe our rejection of Christmas is a rejection of the cold. The snowmen in our front yards have gone from cheerleaders of the season to deformed eyesores, and you look forward to the day when they vanish entirely and you can see grass again. Once, as a kid, I put a sled face-down in the yard before the snow fell. When it snowed, I brought my dad outside, and lifted the sled, which had shielded the grass underneath. I didn’t want him to forget what it looked like.
Most people tolerate the holiday season. If it wasn’t something out of obligation, would we even do it at all? Or would we stay holed up in our warm little bedrooms, going about all the things we never have time for when there are people around? But Santa knows when you’ve been bad or good, and I think we never really grow out of that feeling. If we don’t cherish the family time, bad things will happen.
I don’t cherish family time nine months out of the year. It’s just who I am. If people don’t engage me, initiate, invite, implore me to spend some time with them, I’ll forget all about the outside world.
I wouldn’t mind if Christmas lasted a little bit longer. We could extend that god-awful Christmas Story to cover a few more days. My brother would love for some more time off from school, and we could spend the day playing old N64 games, making silly videos, or going out to a movie. If the season were longer, imagine how many singers and bands would make new Christmas songs, instead of us relying on the backlog we’ve been using for decades. That light show in the living room, alternating reds and blues and oranges and greens, somehow makes the house feel a little bit warmer.
I know I’m two hours in when the music starts skipping. I’d bought one of those little white cassette tapes, like something I imagine them playing in igloos. You slide it into the car’s tape player, and a cord hangs out the right side, like a fishing line hooking my radio. This connects to my iPod.
Without fail, the car catches on to this ruse, this attempt to bring a car made in ’97 into the 21st century. The sound only thrums on the left-side speaker, if at all, and eventually I’m forced to switch to the radio. By this point I’m within range of my favorite back-home station, the one I’ll cling to religiously for the next few weeks.
Then I’m home. The last half-hour of silver slush and rusty rims in Twin Cities traffic floats right by until I’m sitting in my driveway, wondering how long it’s going to take me to lug all of my stuff in.
My hometown seems to have been spared the wind and snow of my college town, like it’s in a pocket universe. It’s a clear, sunny day, enough to melt he paper-thin film of snow left on the driveway. Cold, but that’s refreshing after the stuffy car. Snow towers on all sides from a season of shoveling it into the strip of grass running alongside the driveway. My own little igloo.
My little brother is home, usually. Declan. Sitting in the living room, playing his computer or watching TV. I load up my luggage on the kitchen table. He hears me and I hear him, but we don’t say anything until I head towards the stairs with my first load.
“Hi Declan.”
Or, “What’re you playing?”
Or, “When’s Dad getting home?”
I make a mental note to play something with him later. Cards or video games. Ever since a few years ago, when my dad mentioned over the phone that my little brother was sad when I left, I’d been trying to spend more time with him.
But I am divulging. Let me return to this corruption of the winter holiday. It’s like an untouched village of an indigenous people, strange people, and we blend in without a thought. For the month of December, and however long into January it takes for us to finally take the lights down, they rule our culture with their spirit of peace and goodwill, that spirit which is repugnant to us the rest of the year.
We put up their evergreen trees and burn the yule logs, celebrating the winter solstice and pretending, protesting loudly that it is, in fact, a birthday. This we call Christian. Yet I am no Christian, and I feel no conflict of interest in celebrating this holiday.
Christmas brings motion to our otherwise sterile living room. The white leather couches are rearranged to accommodate the tree, adorned with lights that perform shows for us, flickering this way and that. Late night trips to the kitchen are so much more inviting. There’s always some Christmas music playing along with the lights, or at least, it seems like there is. An iPod hooked up to the speaker system, synced up to a Pandora holiday station.
I feel as though Christmas songs get the brunt of the beating during the warmer months. You can watch a Christmas movie in July if you want to. Those Doctor Who Christmas specials feel strained, re-watching them in March, but not so much that I’d skip them.
But you’ll never hear Christmas-themed songs outside of the holidays. Not one can escape their time of year. Bells simply don’t Jingle outside of winter. Santa Claus is not, in fact, coming to town, how dare you make such a ludicrous claim. Grandma may have been run over by a reindeer, but we’ve all moved on, and you should too.
However, there is one movie that is just as trapped as those songs are: A Christmas Story. Somewhere along the way, a cruel tyrant decided that the thrilling story of Ralphie and his Daisy Red Rider would be played repeatedly. Over and over again. At the height of the season, it will consume us. It used to be a movie that I loved, one of those you’d quote to your friends and take it personally if they didn’t immediately quote back. Something like:
“You’ll shoot your eye out!”
Or, “Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra, ra-ra ra-ra.”
Or, “Oh…. Fudge…”
But it has been decimated. Beating a dead horse doesn’t even begin to describe it. Why does TBS run a 24-hour marathon of just this movie every year on Christmas day?
And you know what’s worse? We watch it. We let it dominate the television in the background. Eventually, we sink into the couch among shreds of wrapping paper, and around the third or fourth time the movie loops back to the beginning, we begin to wonder… why are we watching this?
Yet we don’t change the channel. We just sit there, mesmerized by tradition, blinking in acknowledgment at the famous lines. Somehow, it’s one of the more successful attempts at watching a movie together with my dad. When I try to show him something, he’ll usually fall asleep before the end. If he shows me something, I will usually get bored. But in this mutual, repetitive hell, we’re able to bond over the poor quality and cheesy jokes.
Our conversations are a little easier during the holidays, as well. Even though I know, logically, that there’s more to my pop than boring adult stuff like office supplies and tax forms, there’s still a little kid inside of me that is afraid to bridge the gap, lest I catch some of the responsibility of age.
It’s always: “How are your classes going?”
Or, “Is your car still running okay?”
Or the ever popular, “What’s new?”
Yet over break, we manage to have some pretty good talks. I don’t have to strain mightily to tell him how things are going. We’ll chat about politics, about stuff going on in the family, and on rare occasions we might marathon a show on Netflix that happens to catch both of our interests. Breaking Bad is a gift for our relationship.
New Years is the turning point, when Christmas stops being cute. Your neighbor’s extravagant lawn decorations are just an annoyance. Depending on how much you procrastinate, you’ll drag the shedding Christmas tree to the fire pit between January and March.
Maybe our rejection of Christmas is a rejection of the cold. The snowmen in our front yards have gone from cheerleaders of the season to deformed eyesores, and you look forward to the day when they vanish entirely and you can see grass again. Once, as a kid, I put a sled face-down in the yard before the snow fell. When it snowed, I brought my dad outside, and lifted the sled, which had shielded the grass underneath. I didn’t want him to forget what it looked like.
Most people tolerate the holiday season. If it wasn’t something out of obligation, would we even do it at all? Or would we stay holed up in our warm little bedrooms, going about all the things we never have time for when there are people around? But Santa knows when you’ve been bad or good, and I think we never really grow out of that feeling. If we don’t cherish the family time, bad things will happen.
I don’t cherish family time nine months out of the year. It’s just who I am. If people don’t engage me, initiate, invite, implore me to spend some time with them, I’ll forget all about the outside world.
I wouldn’t mind if Christmas lasted a little bit longer. We could extend that god-awful Christmas Story to cover a few more days. My brother would love for some more time off from school, and we could spend the day playing old N64 games, making silly videos, or going out to a movie. If the season were longer, imagine how many singers and bands would make new Christmas songs, instead of us relying on the backlog we’ve been using for decades. That light show in the living room, alternating reds and blues and oranges and greens, somehow makes the house feel a little bit warmer.