Well, here we are, in December, with Christmas Day rapidly approaching (fifteen days to go!). Whether you celebrate the holiday, or another, or don’t do a damned thing on December 25, 2007, if you live in the United States and venture outside more than once a month, you’ve already encountered the modern-day interpretation of the “holiday season.”

The fact that we now generally always refer to it as the “holiday season” is probably the most amusing transformation “Christmas” has ever undergone. Advertisers, retailers, and other businesses completely and utterly gave up trying to “please everybody,” and, in a rare dose of common sense, started calling it the “holiday season” instead of the “Christmas season.” Saying “Christmas season” started spontaneously offending everyone who didn’t celebrate the actual Judeo-Christian “figurative birth of our spiffy overlord” on December 25. We started hearing a few years ago about all sorts of other holidays, that assorted religions celebrate, and they always happen to coincide (more or less) with the end of December, so everybody started saying “fuck it, no special treatment for any religion — we’re just going to call it The Holidays.”

Works for me.

There are really only three “irritating” things about the “holiday season” nowadays, and they’re really not that bad anymore (for varying reasons).

First, people still treat each other like shit. I love how this always works — if you want to really have some fun, go watch (from a safe distance) a Black Friday doorbuster sale or the last minute shoppers on Christmas Eve to see just how nasty humanity can be. People get trampled. Property gets damaged. Insults get hurled with more speed and urgency than at a Friar’s Club Roast. Americans, especially, have largely been programmed (successfully) by various marketing campaigns and cultural rituals to believe that “Christmas” has to be a perfect, special day. They bust ass to squeeze more from their budgets than they should (or they’ve been saving all year for this “event”), they scramble to find the presents their kids/spouses want, and they become mean-spirited nasty people during the process. Traffic becomes twice as bad this time of year, mostly due to increased aggression.

Some of that aggression is spurred by a hope that the second problem isn’t actually real — but sadly, it is. The sales/specials in stores just aren’t as good as they used to be. This is a completely minor problem, since it saves me bunches of money (the less I buy, the less I spend ) and it makes everyone out there hunting for bargains look foolish.

The third “problem?” Rehashed Christmas tunes. Again, and again, and again. Ugh. Every single year, it seems like the music-making machine (i.e. the same people who sue file sharing music “thieves” to “preserve” the artists’ ability to create groundbreaking musical works … heh) picks a “theme” and starts mass-producing crappy remakes of crappy Christmas songs that weren’t that good to begin with.

This year’s “theme” seems to be “grunge rock,” as in just about every store, over the PA music systems, from cheap “singing” decorations, and CD shilling displays, I’ve heard “rockin’” versions of just about every traditional Christmas carol. Last year they were into “jazzy” renditions, and the year before, I think it was “bluesy” stuff. It goes in cycles, and while every fucking year, artists are compelled to create “new” remakes of the same old crappy songs, it always ends up sounding exactly the same. This year, the trick seems to be adding extra notes, ad-libbing musical phrases and solos where they weren’t needed (and where they sound horrible).

It may just be that the original songs blow chunks already, but I’ve never heard a good remake. Well, The Twelve Pains of Christmas (Bob Rivers Comedy Group) is pretty good, but more for the lyrics and performance than for the tune itself.

Oh well — none of it really gets in the way of my enjoyment of the season anyway. Spending time with good friends, exchanging gifts that we’re thoughtful enough to get for each other, and getting a bit of a breather from work is a kick-ass way to end the year, and I have no real complaints this year I hope your holiday ends up the same way. We can easily ignore the ijits out there and focus on people we care about. Really, that’s how it should work year ‘round. But this month, there’s lots of social pressure to remember that’s how it’s supposed to work

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