It's Christmas! Let's be glad.

Even today the slightest mention of Christmas shopping leaves an empty gnawing in my stomach-- a dull and colorless pain that reminds me of fluorescent department store lights and tube socks. It is no wonder that after years of enduring The Christensen Family Christmas Crisis I have grown to despise the holidays with the same deep antipathy that one usually reserves for truly horrendous things: like racism, terrorism, and corporate fraud.
All my life I have been trying to reconcile this phenomenal event--the incarnation of God-- with Santa Clause and blue-light specials at Kmart and the weird preoccupation people have with buying a lot of junk and giving it to each other every twenty-fifth of December. There is something incredibly phony about Christmas. Or maybe it's just the commercialized holiday cheer speaking.
And then again, I can be a bit of a curmudgeon at this time of year.
The guest bedroom in my house is present-wrapping central. Idle hands in the month of December earns any family member several locked hours in this gift wrap purgatory, with no hope of release until that day's load is safely bundled in brightly colored paper. This crinkly, gaudy, and extraneous material will litter the living room floor on Christmas morning, and then will quickly be torn into millions of shreds by The Babes. Then the gift wrap crumb shavings will sit and sit and catch on jeans as people try to wade through the mess and then will float and slide under the couches and rugs until it is eaten eventually by the vacuum sometime in mid-January. This is just like the pine needles from the fake Christmas tree (that we didn't put up this year) that become embedded in the carpet where the cat finds and eats them, and then gets sick and throws up.
The worst part of Christmas is not the hoarfrost on the windshield or the schmaltzy yuletide carols on the radio or even the extra thick eggnog and fruitcake. The very worst part of Christmas is how it is advantageously stuck between Thanksgiving and New Years, and how when you least expect it, it tiptoes from behind and bites until you bleed... until you bleed money and sleep and health out your wallet and eyes and nose and before you know it you are completely obliterated and Christmas is still three days away.
And then it sinks in-- something that I privately refer to as, "that Creepy Christmas Feeling".
It comes around when families act out the nativity scene and we picture the baby Jesus wrapped up in swaddling clothes- burping and spitting and smiling- a supreme being come to the Earth to save mankind from their sins. It comes on bright snowy nights when every sound is muffled by whiteness and everything is clear and cool and perfect, and the houses are lit up by a hodgepodge of blinking colored lights strung haphazardly from rooftops with the most tacky best intentions. It comes on Christmas Eve when I am lying in my bed, and even in my most mature state and Scrooge-like persona I can't close my eyes because that Creepy Christmas Feeling has spread from my chest to every appendage and extremity of my body until my heart is feverish with the warmth that comes with the Creepiness of Christmas.
Bah humbug!