Holiday season is too long, which makes it too complicated. My answer? NEW HOLIDAY!

Okay so: the truth is I’m far too deep in NaNoWriMo to pull out of it in order to write a proper blog post. I’d apologize, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry for not writing, when the reason I’m not writing is that I’m writing too much. Instead, I’m going to take this time to do some better, more constructive destressing, by writing something that doesn’t mean too much. Writing just for fun. Which I don’t do nearly enough of.

So this weekend is the big turn. The month of October starts with Bitching Season (Though of course, Bitch-Creep has moved back into September, partly because September has no damn holidays. Labor Day. Bah!), when everyone gets mad at everyone else for either A) obsessing too much about Halloween, B) interrupting Halloween season with creeping Christmas cheer (this is mainly the stores that start stocking Santa before Satan has left the building), or C) buying pumpkin spice lattes and pumpkin spice donuts and pumpkin spice toothpaste. (You think I’m kidding. I’m not.) Not to mention the CONTINUING fight over Indigenous People’s Day, which used to be named after a genocidal slaver and rapist who “discovered” a continent 15,000 years after people migrated there from Asia, by “finding” an island that was already populated. But that all passes as we get closer to Halloween, and the Bitching Season becomes the Witching Season (I really want to point out that’s taking a big W for Halloween, because I enjoy making teenagers cringe), and we all enjoy at least a week or so of spookiness and silliness. Then Halloween ends (Here in the Southwest it turns into the Day of the Dead, but I just feel bad for the people who celebrate Dia de Muertos in the US, because it’s gotta be hard to go from the absurdity of Halloween to a genuine, solemn remembrance of those we have lost. Though respect for the cognitive dissonance required to hold a genuine solemn remembrance of those who have passed — with sugar skulls. [Though also please note that calaveras are an inheritance of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec empire, and thus have a whole lot more history than my joke gives credit for]) and — we don’t know what to do.

Do we start celebrating Christmas? On November 1? Or is that too early? Do we need time to wind down from Halloween? Do we start putting up pictures of turkeys? Almost four weeks before the holiday with the weakest iconography of all?

Seriously. Turkeys? I mean, turkey is delicious, don’t get me wrong — it’s one of the few things I genuinely miss since my wife and I became vegetarians (Though to be precise, we are ovolactopescatarians, so there) — but can we all just admit that making cute images of the things we plan to kill and eat is creepy as fuck? Befriending your cows while naming them “Hamburger” and “Sirloin” is terrible. People talking to giant anthropomorphic M&Ms is terrible, especially when they’re talking about eating M&Ms.

This is terrible:

(But this meme is amazing:)

I think the reasonable compromise is to focus more on the autumnal theme, now that it’s actually cold and the leaves have turned and are falling, now that we don’t have the confusion around Halloween. But I realize that’s not terribly exciting. How many times can you sing “Over the River and Through the Woods?” (You knew that was a Thanksgiving song, right?)

So November is a continually awkward part of the holiday season. Once again, but this time nationally, we try to be serious and solemn for once on Veteran’s Day; but in this country (or maybe it’s just me), anything celebrating the military is just so tangled and fraught and therefore just hard to deal with. Awkward, like the rest of the month.

But then Thanksgiving comes. And the week leading up to it is a madhouse of planning and preparation; then the day itself is halfway between madness and celebration — but I think that’s sort of as it should be. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival: and that means we celebrating having busted our asses for the weeks prior trying to get everything harvested before winter comes. Harvest festivals are supposed to be the final relaxation after a time of incredible hard work, bringing in the crops. Which is part of why it’s weird, because we have moved away from the agricultural society that once celebrated the harvest; we are in a state of constant abundance and even overabundance as a society. Our issue with food is not how hard we have to work for it and how rarely we get a surplus of it: it’s how badly we adulterate it, how foolishly we consume it, and why in the name of all that’s good and holy we still can’t manage to get everyone enough of it. Which means, of course, that we shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving until we actually manage a victory in one of those fights: we should have Thanksgiving whenever this country passes a law that provides free lunch at school for kids. We should have Thanksgiving whenever we manage to improve SNAP benefits, and feed hungry families. After that difficult work has been accomplished successfully: that’s when we should be giving thanks.

But one thing is for sure: Thanksgiving is not the time for feeling bad about the problems in the world. That is the real gift of the season: it’s time to actually focus on the good things, for once. And yes, that’s hard: the bad things are still around us, and keep happening, and if we are at all aware and sensitive to the suffering of others, it’s so very hard to be happy with and thankful for what we have without also feeling guilty for having what others don’t. But it’s useless to compare lives. We all try to live the best lives we can, and the fact that some of us live happier lives than others is, first, not a safe assumption, considering that anthropologists have shown that hunting, gathering, and foraging is generally a better and happier life; and secondly, usually not our fault. If we actively fuck up others’ lives for our own profit, then yes, we should feel guilty about that. But most of us are not corporate robber barons or exploiters of child labor or the like. So the point is, it’s important to remember that there are good things in our lives. And Thanksgiving, for all the cheesiness of being thankful and whatnot, is a perfect time to remember some of those good things. Family. Food. Celebrations with games and decorations and all that.

And then, of course, we move straight into unbridled consumerism: Black Friday. I don’t think I need to add my screed to the copious outpouring of bile about how terrible this day is conceptually; the truth is, I don’t buy a lot of stuff, and I sometimes like buying stuff: that being the case, sometimes I like buying stuff for cheap. So I usually buy something on Black Friday. And yes, I feel kind of bad about that; I’m aware that makes me a supporter of the consumerist culture that is killing everything. But since Thanksgiving is a time for focusing on the good side of things, and Christmas is the same, I’m going to focus on being happy that I got a new Blu-Ray/DVD player for $60, and so I can stop playing movies on my tired old PS3. (Also, that means I can move my PS3 into my office, along with the old TV we just replaced, and I can actually have my dream gaming setup. Please note that this is the first time I have ever had this — a dedicated gaming TV not in the living room — and I’m fucking 48. Like I said, I don’t buy a lot of stuff. Not gonna feel bad about buying this stuff.)

Suffice it to say that riots on Black Friday, and the excessive spending and consuming, and the commodification of the good parts of the holidays, are all terrible and disgusting and should be opposed.

So after Black Friday, we have the newest attempts to commodify and exploit the consumerist culture during the holiday season: one for a good cause, and one for the worst. Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. Small Business Saturday is a lovely idea, and a wonderful cause: I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I am a self-published novelist, and I would love to sell you copies of my books; you can buy them from Lulu.com — which is not a small business, but also is not Amazon — or from Barnes and Noble — again, not an independent bookseller, but certainly not Amazon — or you can contact me directly (Comment here or find me on Facebook or Twitter) and I will sell it to you myself. Also my wife is a brilliant artist who sells her work through Facebook and Instagram.

And then on the other side is Cyber Monday, the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, who felt that one day buying shit was not enough of corporations exploiting American consumers, and so he made up a new shopping day that focused on his business, and intentionally took time away from productive work, because the idea of using Monday was that was the day everyone went back to work and had computer access: at work. To go holiday shopping, instead of working. Look at capitalism at its finest! However: while I detest Bezos and Amazon, I recognize two things: one, there are lots of places — I used to live in one — where shopping access is limited, and Amazon frequently is the only and usually is the cheapest way for people to get things they want and need; and also, while Amazon is grossly exploitative of content creators, still they do furnish something of a marketplace; so I will, once again, look at the bright side: sometimes it’s good to buy things, and buying things online is not inherently bad, so people can do a good thing on Cyber Monday by shopping. I do not believe that the toxicity of the seller transfers entirely to the buyer, unless the buyer is actively propping up the evil done by the seller.

After this whole weekend, spent recovering from the preparations and celebrations of Thanksgiving, and with three days dedicated to shopping — what is supposedly holiday gift shopping, but really is just shopping — as I said, there is a turn. The Christmas radio stations start broadcasting. The decorations start coming out. I put antlers and a red nose on our car. ChristmaHanuKwanzaakkah time is now in full swing. We teachers are counting the days (Fourteen school days!!) until Winter Break. We all start asking — “Wait, what do you mean it’s almost 2023?!?” Christmas cheer, and Christmas melancholy as well, kick it into high gear. After this weekend, the long awkward time is over, and we can all focus: so this, then, is the good time, the next month or so.

But there’s a hole there. Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday — see what’s missing?

It’s today.

So I have a suggestion. Since tomorrow begins the Happy Holiday season in earnest (It started earlier, of course, but tomorrow we all have to see each other again, and the Christmas cheer will be inescapable — and also, for the most part, genuinely nice), we should take one last chance to be in a bad mood. To be crappy, and to complain about anything and everything.

I would like to suggest Sourpuss Sunday.

As with all holidays, the existence of a special day in celebration of a specific idea or situation does not mean we can’t celebrate that thing any or every other day; there are people for whom every day is Veteran’s Day, and people for whom every day is the 4th of July. I do not tell my wife I love her only on Valentine’s Day, and for many people, Earth Day is all year. There is already something of this sort in the Festivus celebrations, which I support wholeheartedly, in the Airing of Grievances. But that comes too close to Christmas for me: I get happier as we get closer to the actual day, as the school season ends and I get to spend all my time pounding eggnog and looking at Christmas decorations. I think now, as part of the farewell to the awkward time, as a last hurrah for the darkness of Halloween, as a bit of relief after the stress of family on Thanksgiving, and well before the stress of family on Christmas: we should have a day when we bitch.

So let me start things off, and then invite you all to continue it in your own way.

I’m sick. Not very sick: not too sick to stay home from work, or to avoid obligations; just sick enough, with a cough and a stuffy runny nose, to feel miserable whenever I lay down to sleep, and then again first thing in the morning when I get up. So basically, I’m just sick enough to make every day kind of awful. I hate snot.

I don’t know if I have a cold or the flu or Covid; it’s most likely that I’ve gone from one to another, and maybe through all three, and so has my wife. I HATE that we’ve added Covid to the usual collection of germs that come flying in for the winter: I hate that it makes the already dangerous flu season that much more deadly, and also that it means all the right-wing assholes in this country have to avoid vaccinations and masks and social distancing on principle. Fuck the politicization of disease: it’s a fucking disease, you shitheads. Just go to the damn doctor and do what the damn doctor says.

Speaking of right-wing assholes (And please don’t get me wrong: the operative term there is “assholes.” That is who I’m complaining about. Not people who are conservatives, or Republicans, or people who are generally right of me politically, all the way to the end of the spectrum: just the assholes among them.), FUCK Elon Musk and every single person on Twitter right now. I used to enjoy Twitter. It was fun, and funny. I spent an entire year tweeting out the lyrics of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one letter at a time, backwards, so it could be read by scrolling through my timeline. (Yes, I’m serious. Every Tweet I twitted in 2021 was part of that project. I am proud of it. I will always be.) But then, a couple of months ago, they changed the algorithm so that I had to start seeing more right-wing troll accounts in my Twitter feed. I assume it was because they wanted to increase interaction. And even though I knew I was being manipulated, it still worked: because I have a deep-seated need to reply to people who speak lies and falsehoods, and that was basically every single one of the Twitterati on the right. (Again: it’s not about being on the right, it’s about these particular fucktoads, who would be just as obnoxious if they were on the left. Also, I had one of the most annoying exchanges I’ve had in the last month or two with a leftist who failed to understand that I was on her side, and who kept giving me shit until she finally blocked me.) And ever since Elon took it over, the wave of masturbatory celebration, all founded on complete bullshit (“Elon fired everyone at Twitter and it’s working fine! Clearly all those overpaid leftist Twitter execs did nothing!” Right. Until there actually is a problem, and the whole fucking thing collapses because there’s not enough people to fix the problem. But since it’s been going fine for like two weeks, CLEARLY THERE WILL NEVER BE A PROBLEM EVER AND WE ALL SHOULD HIGH FIVE ABOUT IT), is just getting to be too much to take.

I’m also bitter about my inability to let things go. I don’t even like social media, in concept. But here I am, fighting pointlessly to save a platform that I am not enjoying, just because I can’t let things go. Sigh.

I would also like to complain about obligatory family phone calls on the holidays. I love my parents. I like talking to them. But the requirement that, every year, I have to call my dad and tell him what I’m eating, and listen to what he’s eating, well — it’s a little too much. It’s certainly not the worst thing: there are people who have much harder family obligations, and much harder holidays because of family, than me. But really. I’m tired of hearing about how big the turkey is.

And speaking of having the same conversation over and over again, I would like to propose that every single time a student in my classes says “Can we just do nothing today? It’s a half day,” a full day gets added to that student’s school year. I would also like to propose that every time a student says “Can we do nothing today? It’s Friday” that student loses a weekend. And every time a student says “Can we do nothing today? It’s Monday,” I would like to propose that Garfield pop up out of the ground and slap them.

I am so bloody tired of being the only one in the room who wants to do the work, and who has to fight with everyone else just to do what we’re all there to do. So tired of it.

OH AND ALSO

We bought this new TV, right? And it’s very nice. It’s a Smart TV. Which means it has internet capability, and can stream our digital services without the need for our Roku receiver. Cool. Except that requires that I create an account for the TV, which is an LG, and then sign into that account on the TV in order to do things like “install” the Netflix app directly on the Smart TV.

It won’t let me log in.

I spent two hours fucking around with that thing last night. I made an account, registered it, confirmed it with the email address, and then tried to log in on the TV — nothing happened. I tried a dozen times: still nothing. I changed the password, even though I was using the right password: no change. Still wouldn’t log in. It didn’t say “Login failed,” didn’t tell me that the username or password was wrong; just every time I clicked “Log In,” the loading icon appeared, and then disappeared, and I was still not logged in. I tried to use a different method of logging in — using a QR code on my phone, and then logging in through the website that came up — and the phone logged in, but then the TV said “Verifying login information” and didn’t do anything after that. Over and over, trying to log in to the “Smart” TV we bought, so that I could make our streaming more convenient. That’s all.

And let me note: I was logging in using the remote to move a cursor across a keyboard on the screen, to enter all the letters and numbers and special characters in my email address and the password. Said password, of course, had to be at least 8 characters long, including upper and lower case, a numeral and a special character. Right right right right up up click, left left left left left left down click. Over and over.

Still didn’t work.

I JUST WANT TO LOG IN! TO USE YOUR FUCKING SERVICE!

Okay. There.

That’s better.

Now. How about you?