Uh Oh...It's the Holidays Again

Thanksgiving through New Years: The Holiday Season.

Isn't it interesting that for a little over a month EVERY year, we voluntarily put ourselves through the craziness that is the Holidays, for fun?

Think about it. It all starts on Thanksgiving with a theme that keeps on giving. Eating. You bust your ass exercising for 11 months out of the year just to undo it with copious eating of at least 2 holiday dinners, a weeks worth of left-overs, those cookies from your aunt, and the daily holiday snacks near the coffee pot at work.

I'm generally pretty careful, but when I go home for the holidays, my house is filled with readily available snack food. It's as if I never left! When I get the munchies, I'll rummage around for a snack, and I'm likely to find an old unopened box of Fruit Rollups or Capri Sun's that I would've been packed in my middle school lunch.

But the real madness is the start of "Shopping Chaos Season." Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, all the way to Christmas Eve.

My God what a nightmare.

Last year, I made the mistake of leaving the house on Black Friday, to pick up a couple of necessities. Bad Move. Going down the isle's in Costco was impossible with the insane amounts of cart traffic. I was forced to ditch my cart and bob-and-weave my way between carts and hyperactive toddlers like motorcycles on the freeway.

This year, driving home from Thanksgiving dinner, I noticed a line forming at Best Buy for the doors to open the next day!

This is just ludicrous to me. Let's do a little analysis, shall we?

Freezing Cold: Check
Hard-ass concrete bed for the night: Check
Undervaluing of Time: Check
Likelihood of Spending Extreme amounts of money: Check

How is this a winning plan? They'll open the doors, you'll run inside and grab the super-huge TV you've been wanting that's discounted 200 bucks, and you'll still be on a payment plan for the thing! Honestly, I just don't understand how people can make payments on something like a TV. A college education? Good Investment. A car? Usually necessary. But a freaking TV? I could rant about that, all on it's own, but I'll spare you.

I'm all for buying gifts for people, but my time is too valuable to be spent camping outside of Best Buy or Walmart. I'd rather just pay more money for the same thing. There is one thing that I hate having to re-shop for every year though.

Can someone honestly explain to me, what is sooooo strenuous about the storage process of Christmas lights that just kills them? I don't understand, why after all these years, someone hasn't invented a string of lights that will last more than a year or two! You spend hours testing the damn things, locating the sucky bulbs, and replacing them. When you put them away they work fine. Next year, you open them up and surprise!...dead strand.

AT LEAST invent a strand where the whole goddamn thing doesn't die if one measly bulb goes out! When one of the track lights in my living room goes out, the other two miraculously stay on! Somehow though, the process of duplicating this feet of light independence was deemed too difficult to apply to Christmas lights. I would happily pay twice as much for a light strand that actually held up during the arduous year of sitting in a well heated storage room.

I do like seeing lights decorating neighborhood houses. In fact, I'm all about getting in the Christmas spirit after Thanksgiving. It's a little difficult in San Diego, when the closest thing you get to playing in the snow is beach volleyball. But, I try to get in the spirit.

I've been wearing a Santa Hat around work. And, I've tried listening to Christmas carols via Pandora online radio.

But whatever happened to the old fashioned classic Christmas songs? I turn the radio on, and all I want is a little Bing Crosby or Jose Feliciano. Instead, I get Michael Bolton belting out Silent Night, Vanessa Williams singing some song I've never hear of from "A Very Diva Christmas," and about fifty-three versions of "Santa Baby."

And speaking of Santa, I've noticed a disturbing trend of sucky mall Santas. The other day, I was in the mall and I saw a Santa strolling back to his Santa hut, with his glasses off, beard pulled down, eating a sandwich!!! What is this?!? What kind of Santa strolls around the mall, eating a sandwich with his beard pulled down?? I was pissed and I have a good mind to leave the real Santa a note alerting him to this when he stops by my house this year.

Yes, I still get gifts from Santa every Christmas. By the way Santa, if you're reading this, that whole snafu with the free smoothies wasn't really my fault, the finagling of the free cell phone was the fault of my uncontrollable charm, I didn't really mean to con the cast of the Road Rules, and oh, I like Ferrari's :)