Slouching Away From Bethlehem*

For those of us not interested in Being Of Good Cheer

I am not a Scrooge or a Grinch. But I have no use for this holiday.

I don’t hate Christmas but I do wonder why so many otherwise thoughtful, intelligent, even progressive people are completely on board with this most blatantly capitalist boondoggle. Just the amount of trash going into landfills should give users of Christmas pause.

According to Stanford University Press:

Americans throw away 25% more trash during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday period than any other time of year. The extra waste amounts to 25 million tons of garbage, or about 1 million extra tons per week!

If every family reused just two feet of holiday ribbon, the 38,000 miles of ribbon saved could tie a bow around the entire planet. If every American family wrapped just 3 presents in re-used materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields. The 2.65 billion Christmas cards sold each year in the U.S. could fill a football field 10 stories high. If we each sent one card less, we’d save 50,000 cubic yards of paper.

I still clearly remember that kind of sick feeling as a kid sitting in my grandmother’s living room surrounded by piles of ripped gift wrapping and cast aside boxes after the flurry of opening presents as if we’d all eaten too many sweets. All the weeks of anticipation lead to…….this?

As an adult, I used to try and recreate the holiday but it felt like the only thing I was able to recreate was the sickening feeling when it was all over. Now for the big clean-up. About twenty years ago I had the revelation that I didn’t have to do any of it. I didn’t have to buy anything. I didn’t have to give anyone any gifts. I didn’t have to lug a tree in and trim it or cook too much food. Moreover, I didn’t have to accept presents either.

I quit Christmas

I will say that ignoring Christmas and even New Year’s in New York City is easier than it was back in Cleveland and orders of magnitude easier than in any of the small towns I managed to escape.

Even so, navigating the holiday requires ingenuity and fortitude.

After weeks of stress and preparation here comes the Big Let-down and, while I’ve long distanced myself from that happy horseshit, I still have to figure out how to maneuver through the various obstacles to everyday life that still get thrown in everyone’s path on Christmas. The subways don’t run often and forget about buses. Fortunately, I like Chinese food because those restaurants will all be open. An upside is finding entire swaths of town which are usually packed with rushing crowds to be deserted (Times Square is not ever deserted, however, so don’t bother).

However, all the stores will either be closed or closing early so I’d better be sure to have whatever I’ll need for the day. It is my incredible good luck that my partner is not of the holiday persuasion so it’s that much easier to hole up and ignore the whole show. Here’s his take on the madness:

For years, however, I was on my own when it came to negotiating The Day

Probably the best Christmas I can remember was the year that William, John, Chris and I went down to the new Tribeca performance space for the 92nd Street Y (As in Young Men’s Hebrew Association not to be confused with the YMCA, also a fine organization if a little less in touch culturally). They were having a Monty Python double feature, “Monty Python and The Holy Grail” and “The Life of Brian”, followed by a kosher Chinese buffet. It was absolutely glorious.

It is an unfortunate truth that if you have children and are not a Jehovah’s Witness, you’re pretty much trapped into Christmas. That’s really awful because this holiday is nothing more than an indoctrination into Buy More Stuff.

It’s Capitalism 101 and it is mandatory

I realize that I’m in a tiny minority but there are more of us every year. We get shushed and called names and even pitied by our Christmas-blinded peers. That’s ok. We save hundreds of dollars and never have to subject ourselves to holiday travel or sitting next to extended family members who either drink too much or extol the virtues of (fill in the blank here; there are many choices).

So, yes, I understand that my ability to step away from the madness is a privilege that was made much easier by not having, or wanting, kids. And, yes, I get it that anyone who chooses to quit Christmas is in for some heavy peer pressure. But take a look at how quickly we’re decimating our habitable bits of planet and make your choices.

See you on the other side!

© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved

*Apologies to Joan Didion and W.B.Yeats

Add your name, join my readers: