Tag Archives: holidays

Happy Mom’s Day

To all the mothers out there, enjoy your special day. Which is always on a Sunday. Which most of you would have gotten off anyway. Which is kind of a rip off, if you think about it.

(This was supposed to be published yesterday, but I messed up the scheduling.)

Tonight, Tomorrow, Next Year

Well, that does it for 2011. Wasn’t it terrible? How is everyone? Everybody okay? Tonight’s the night we marshal our dwindling resources in preparation for the coming slog… by getting plastered and staying up all night.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Nothing Left But The Future

If you celebrated Christmas this last Sunday, I hope you had a good one. Are you okay? Is everyone all right? Now’s a good time to check in, I think, before we all go over the edge of the year in a barrel.

Speaking of New Year’s, I am completely over that shit. Even amongst holidays, it is the king of insisting upon its own significance. Where will you be on December 31st? Better be somewhere special!

OR ELSE YOU WILL HAVE WASTED THE WHOLE YEAR.

It’s irritating, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I?

For once?

The Naughty Christmas Megapost

They say that Christmas is for families, and to a lot of people that means children. Well, bah! I say. What of the billions of childless adults out there? The wholesome mystique that surrounds Christmas is not for them, no sir! For their sake, we have collected a few of the more naughty odds and ends (that is: links) into a single post. Before you read on, be aware that the following content is Not Safe For The Hallmark Channel.

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The Biggest Day

Well, here we are: it’s Christmas morning at long last. This is the moment that three months of commercial bombardment have been leading up to. Did you get a car?

Christmas is at the very bottom of the pile of days. That’s an incredible amount of pressure for a single 24 hour period to sustain. Oh, and it’s supposed to be fun, too.

It’s easy to say that we should let it get to us, but really–my advice is to take frequent breaks, and to go easy on yourself.

Have a merry Christmas.

Season’s So Forth

Well, I hope you all have a good Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing. (I will be spending mine crammed into a little house with my… family, so that’ll be fun. I swear, if it weren’t for the Doctor Who Christmas episode, the whole day would be a bit of a waste.)

I should have a post or something up here on Christmas. It’s a surprise! To me, too!

Ungrateful Bastard Day

Here we are; we made it. We’ve gotten through yet another Thanksgiving day.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something interesting about how people tend to view Thanksgiving. It is widely seen as an opportunity to briefly step back from our lives and consider just how fortunate we all are for the things that we have, and how indebted we are to other people for all of the things that they do to make our lives better. It is a short window of time in which we are encouraged to readjust our perspectives, to shed our day-to-day view of the world, and show some gratitude for a change.

That is to say, Thanksgiving is a corrective. Our attitude towards it implies that our outlook during the other 364 non-Thanksgiving days of the year is somehow out of whack. And that makes complete sense, when you consider that a vast majority of people tend to believe that a huge number of their fellow citizens are a bunch of entitled, whiny, assholes. If that belief is correct, then there is a dire need for a holiday like Thanksgiving–we need at least one day out of the year where people are encouraged to stop complaining about all their first-world bullshit, and to think about how damn lucky they are, for a change.

Don’t get excited. I have no intention of claiming that the vast majority human beings are anything but entitled, narcissistic, selfish buttholes.

But there are a few saints out there. Often, they are the ones who make Thanksgiving work–getting squalling family members together, putting in long hours in hot, disgusting kitchens, providing liquor to lapsed alcoholics (because they bitch if there isn’t any, even though they shouldn’t have access to it),  putting up boorish relatives in their spare bedrooms, and generally running themselves ragged for the benefit of always-unappreciative others. And it’s not just Thanksgiving that brings out these folks’ helpful and uncomplaining natures; they are like that all of the time.

You kind of want to hear these people go off. But they never do, because someone out there has always got it worse than they do, because at least they have the ability and the freedom to put themselves out there, which is not something that less fortunate people have. Because they have a stoic outlook that posits that whining doesn’t accomplish anything, and is therefore a waste of time.

Well, I say that these people deserve a special holiday of their own. I propose that we set aside a day when these poor souls are allowed to take a break from the services they provide to their friends, family, and community.

I propose the creation of an Ungrateful Bastard Day.

Let’s give them a holiday that grants them permission to be bitter about their life’s situation. Let’s allow them to really consider (and loudly complain) about all the ways that the world has fucked them over or shit on their heads. Let’s give them leave to bitterly remonstrate those people in their lives who have let them down or betrayed their trust. Let us patiently sit and listen to their unexpurgated litany of grievances, and then buy them a drink. A lot of drinks. And let us truly ungrateful bastards take our well-deserved verbal thrashings like adults, politely absorbing the full measure of our calumny and general out-and-out shittyness as human beings, without defensiveness or rationalization.

Obviously, this isn’t a holiday for everyone. Most of us don’t deserve a special day set aside to revel in childish petulance. Our role is merely to endure the criticism that we so richly deserve. But how do we decide who gets a free pass to whine for a whole day about the injustices the world has personally inflicted upon them?

This is where it gets complicated, I’m afraid. Because the ones who deserve it most will never take advantage of the opportunities presented by Ungrateful Bastard Day. That is to say, if you catch someone rubbing their hands together and muttering, “I can’t wait for Ungrateful Bastard Day; then I’ll show you all how terrible you really are,” you can disqualify that person from participation.

The target demographic for the holiday is more likely to say something along the lines of, “Oh my, that sounds like a terrible holiday. Yes dear, of course I’ll loan you bail money.” That’s kind of a problem. What’s the point of setting aside a day for the saintly to be a little shirty, if they’re exactly the sorts of people who habitually refuse to do any such thing?

I wish it would be as simple as just calling them up and saying, “All right–let me have it!” but somehow I don’t think that would work.

Maybe we should get them drunk first.

Such A Thanking

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American pals. As for the rest of the world, happy whatever local holiday it happens to be where you are. Make one up, I don’t care. If you’re lucky, you’re homeland will embrace it, and it will become yet another thing that foreigners don’t understand about you. Pfft.

It’s an absolutely filthy day where I am at the moment. I’ve been up since around 3:30 AM, and it’s been raining consistently since then. I am looking forward to getting in a series of naps before I officially have Stuff To Do.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good day–or the best one that you can.

And thank you.