Earthrise– December 24, 1968. Will Anders
I remember the Christmas when I got the Red Ryder BB Gun after I had been led to believe my best gift was going to be a very nice football and a homemade Easter Bunny suit from my lovably well-meaning aunt. Sure, I remember the one when I got the G.I. Joe with the ‘kung-fu grip,’ too. I vaguely remember the one when we all made this supernatural snowman that danced around and made outlandish statements about the dangers of climate change.
Then there was the time my uncle lost $8,000– all of the assets from the family’s penny-ante building and loan business. He claimed he was robbed, a victim of theft, but he drank a lot and the whole town showed up to my house on 34th Street and Jackson to save the day and we all sipped house wine from Tiny Tim’s hollowed out leg-flask. He was cool with it.
That was almost as memorable as the time our annual Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza was taken over by German terrorists and a dude who looked just like Bruce Willis systematically took them down one by one in his bare feet with nothing more than Christmas cheer and a dead guy’s semi-automatic candy cane.
Gun-Toting Santa. Kyle Baker 1986. The Spectacular Spider-Man #112
We would all sing songs about Auld Lang Syne and balls of holly, and we just knew that we were singing about “happy balls.” Good family fun for those with and without balls alike, because let’s face it, we didn’t even know who, or what the fuck an Auld Lang Syne was, but we all knew the comedic value of happy balls.
We didn’t care. We were all together, bonded by blood alcohol levels and our inbred hatred of the Packers, all still sort of feeding from the same historical cosmic trough of familial scraps, begging for the blessings of loose meat-ends our whole lives.
Those were the days when slipping LSD into the thrice-spiked eggnog was considered a hospitable start to the designated driver’s evening. When chopping down our own Christmas tree seemed less like a senseless bludgeoning of sacred vegetation, but a sacrificial monument for Santa Jesus’s need to be dragged to the curb, or tossed from a second story window, left for dead once the great white god of knowing you’ve had your eye on that little red number for months has been appeased. Before gloopsticked pets, gerrymandering sandwiches and microwavable butter.
The days when workplace discrimination against lazy, ungrateful elves who forgot their place was not only encouraged, but always remedied by tax cuts and the kind of right to work laws that once built our traditional Christmas dreams and retail institutions from the ground up, with imported steel beams and shatter-resistant ceilings.
Not so long ago when mocked and alienated reindeer with physical deformities could be counted on to, at the very least, perform miracles while leading a sleigh being driven by Jolly Saint Mississippi Slaver Santa. Heh, heh. It’s called, “keep up, not catch up,” Rudolph!
I’m pretty sure those days actually existed before this holiday season, the days before Right wing media’s militant surge in the war on Christmas, that is.
War-face never looked so “who-farted?”
A once mighty and mostly unified front, courtly and discreet atop its superior podium in the Parthenon of inferior deities and their Third World animal-worshiping holidays– now reduced to a seasonal grievance ritual for the overindulged meritocracy class acting out their White Santa abandonment issues.
A great American holiday season of gift-bearing, slightly-liquored up kindness and pothead forgiveness couldn’t remember its birth control and rape whistle forever, so a new holiday season baby gestates in the bellies of Ignorance and Want– not to be confused with their poorly focus-grouped GOP counterparts, “Uppity and Mooch.” A holiday season born of immaculate perception from the ashes of human ovens and 80s blooper reels, where all ye faithful gather around to be tied to the chair you’re sitting in when the country music stops and merrily doused with gasoline by the before and after versions of the Duck Dynasty people.
I long for the days of Auld Lang Syne, whomever, or wherever that may be.
Maybe this all started when the Freedom From Tomorrows and Revisionist History Act was signed by American history’s jolliest and most forgetful president, Ronald Reagan. Bam! Pow! Or maybe it was when we all simultaneously realized that the NSA was out there, right now, in a van parked outside your inbox, listening to everything we say and do! I can’t remember exactly. But you can’t silence me, NSA! You can’t silence me, Obummer. It says so on my empty bottles of prescription red pills.
Like all seasons we enter anew, tis now the season of giving– of Brother & Sisterwifehood; Corporatehood, Fetushood, Lizardhood– after taxes.
But someday soon, perhaps after all these acquaintances have been forgotten and never again brought to mind, we can take a cup of kindness yet, and piss especially thrice-spiked eggnog into the freshly fallen snow of their memory.
Signed, “for old times’ sake, fuckers!”
In cursive. Because we’re better than the animals.