Musings of a Middling Christmas.

Okay, let's get things out of the way first. I send my holiday greetings, a nice Happy Holidays so as not to offend anyone. And so with formalities out of the way, let's get to the truth. It doesn't feel quite like Christmas this year. Mind you, I have made no formal studies in the differences in Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or even Festivus, so I don't know if it feels incredibly different by comparison, but Christmas itself feels kind of like another day. I mean, other than the presents, and me being happy that I got a few things I didn't need to save up to buy, it's a very conventional day.

Even Mother Nature last night didn't really care what day it was. In Tuscaloosa, there were high gusts of wind and lots of rain. Also, the temperature was 60 degrees at the lowest. This is not even typical December weather, much less Christmas Eve weather.

And of course, many elements play a part in the mediocrity Christmas has sort of become to me.

The first thing is obvious, I'm not exactly a kid anymore. When I ask for Christmas presents now, I basically just go online, order it, they send it in a week or so and I get it. And it's not even like toys or games or anything. My big present this year was that I got three Chuck Klosterman books and a few T-shirts I had wanted for quite a while. And these things are awesome, but they don't have the instant gratification factor, really. The benefit of shirts is to wear in public, and no sane person is out in public on Christmas Day. And book reading is always great, but most great books are a sort of marathon where you read a good little bit at a time and enjoy the book's structure, words, and whatnot. I never thought I would focus on the future and nice things to wear around from January to May, but that's basically what's happened.

The second thing, though, I can blame on television. With so many television channels running round-the-clock programming, there is no way that everyone wants to cover something about Christmas. While there are the traditional holiday standards like the classic It's A Wonderful Life, television still more or less moves on. Repeats rarely seem to cover the subject, and don't get me started on how little of a damn I care about Nancy Grace and her spending five days a week on a missing toddler when hundreds go missing without a trace of press. Of course, I don't think she spent her Eve show talking about said toddler, instead it's to the just as soul-crushing subject of kids with cancer.

On the television point, it doesn't help that there's crap all for specials these days. I mean, Rudolph, Frosty, and Charlie Brown don't stop being great. But Jeff Dunham? Are you seriously going to tell me that a guy with a mildly offensive Arabic stereotype puppet and who is at most mildly hilarious is supposed to send me some real Christmas funny? Thank God that A Colbert Christmas was on this year, at least.

And finally, I think I see the season through rose colored glasses. There has never been snow on Christmas Eve in the many years I've had Christmas in Tuscaloosa. At least, I don't think there has. But anyways, there never was that much to remember about the season. I think I got a Sega Genesis video game system one year, and that made my life for like five years or so. There was one year where the electricity was out, but that wasn't even here in Tuscaloosa. That was in my former home of Louisiana, and nothing about that year was particularly memorable except for the lack of electricity caused by a nice ice storm.

So I guess I'm the Scrooge of this season. Which is kind of not true in the sense that I still enjoy Christmas and getting free gifts, but I'm on that sort of downslide. There's not much time left to enjoy the getting, so I sort of shrug my way through those years. Or maybe my views on Christmas would've been changed if they just shown It's A Wonderful Life without commercials this year. Get on that next year, NBC.