Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: christmas

  • Holiday Songs

    I like to change the words to songs.  Here are a couple of examples.

    Santa Got Run Over By My Grandma
    Santa got run over by my grandma
    As she drove home from our house, Christmas Eve
    You may say there’s no such thing as Santa
    But as for me and State Farm, we believe

    He was moving much too slowly
    And there wasn’t room to pass
    So she threw it into third gear
    Floored the Porsche and drove it straight up Santa’s ass

    (up his ass, up his ass)
    When they found him Christmas morning
    There were tire tracks on his nuts
    And all the little reindeer
    Had identical marks upon their butts

    Santa got run over by my grandma
    As she drove home from our house, Christmas Eve
    You may say there’s no such thing as Santa
    But as for me and State Farm, we believe

    When Dasher’s antler forked poor Rudolph
    Boy that really must have throbbed
    But come on over to our house
    We’re all having venison shish ka bobs

    (shish ka bobs)

    Now Grandma doesn’t have her license
    ‘cuz they suspended it last year
    Using words like “speed” and “wreckless”
    And the letters D U I, or so I hear

    Santa got run over by my grandma
    As she drove home from our house, Christmas Eve
    You may say there’s no such thing as Santa
    But as for me and State Farm, we believe

    We are all so proud of Debbie**
    She’s been taking it so well
    She just wants to find my grandma
    Shoot her dead and send that ancient bitch to hell

    (straight to hell)
    It’s just not Christmas without Santa
    All the Elves are dressed in black
    They are sitting at the North Pole
    Playing cards, drinking beer and smoking crack

    Santa got run over by my grandma
    As she drove home from our house, Christmas Eve
    You may say there’s no such thing as Santa
    But as for me and State Farm, we believe

    It’s the little old lady from Pasadena
    Go Granny Go Granny Go Granny Go

    ** at the time a local radio commercial featured Mrs. Claus and revealed her name to be Debbie

    O Festivus

    O Festivus, O Festivus
    A celebration for the rest of us
    O Festivus, O Festivus
    For all the worst and best in us

    You need no tinsel to distract
    The ornaments, just leave them packed
    O Festivus, O Festivus
    And saving money is a plus

    We gather ’round a simple pole
    Lack of excess tis our goal
    O Festivus, O Festivus
    Aluminum, it does not rust

    We list the ways we’ve been let down
    Said with a smile or with a frown
    O Festivus, O Festivus
    No need for smalltalk to discuss

    Challenged to the feats of strength
    No need to show any restraint
    O Festivus, O Festivus
    Continued ’til there’s tears and fuss

    O Festivus, O Festivus
    Some pleasure doth thou bring us
    O Festivus, O Festivus
    Enjoyment for the rest of us

  • Yep, still typing

    This year marks the 12th Christmas we have not celebrated. We talked about it. We thought about it. We determined it was not providing us with the purported joy. We agreed. We decided. We quit. We told the people we felt we needed to.

    Our daughter is 11. She grew up not celebrating. While the concept of a child, and what I would teach them, was part of the decision, as a person she has been one of the difficult aspects of it. The feeling of being different, of not being normal, can be hard on a child. People like to poke at differences. They want to know why. They want the difference explained and defended, or *fixed*. They think they have the right to that.

    One December when she was 5 we went to get her picture taken at some crappy in store photo place. She was cute when she was 5 though, so any photos would do and the cheaper was much better for the wallet. A few reasonable sized photos, plus 200 little useless throw away ones so they could advertise a large bundle, for $4.99. It’s a long way from art, but it made my grandmother happy. The button pushing salesmonkey asked her what she was doing for Christmas and she shrugged and responded that we didn’t celebrate Christmas. Salesmonkey freaked out. “What do you mean?! What do you do?!” Salesmonkey stares at me wondering why my child is retarded and lying, “You do celebrate Christmas, don’t you? Why is she saying that?!” I shook my head. “Why not?!!!” Salesmonkey wailed. The kid was traumatized.

    A few weeks later, in January, we were at our favorite (at the time) sushi place. One of the chefs asked her what she had gotten for Christmas and she froze up. She did not want a repeat of the last scene. He asked again. She looked at me. He looked at me. Her behavior was quite odd. She was always extremely friendly with this chef and now it looked like she didn’t know how to speak. “We don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told him. He looked at her and smiled warmly, “Neither do I.” She beamed.

    One of the things that catches attention from certain people about not celebrating is the “not Christian” aspect. Most of the Christians we run into are used to being in the comfortable majority in the country. They’ve heard of the other big religions, but we don’t *look* (Muslim, Jewish, or one of them there “eastern religions”). This means we might be something else, something worse. I’m already long comfortable with the fact that in pretty much every aspect of my life, I am something worse, but this is another area that is harder on the kid.

    Like with most things, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, and we chose to homeschool. Now, most things about homeschooling are really wonderful, and we have some terrific friends who homeschool. However, there is a rather large sized portion of the homeschooling community who are not just “I was raised Christian, so I mark the Christian box” but are instead fervently Christian. We interact with these people at group events, classes, field trips, sports days and more. “What church do you go to?” is commonly asked within the first 5 sentences by many of these people. Now I cannot begin to give a rat’s ass about somebody who doesn’t want to talk to me anymore because I don’t go to church, I mean, really I am grateful if they are going to weed me out for that reason. Still a kid likes to have friends, and more than that. A kid does not like to be teased and bullied. Ever seen a 10 year old, and more than a foot taller, boy get physical with a 7 year old girl because when he asked if she believed in Jesus, she gave “In my family religion is personal and we don’t talk about it outside the home.”as her response? Well, I have.

    Over the years we’ve learned little tricks. Stick her in a Harry Potter t-shirt when going to an event with a new group. It keeps a certain element from even starting to interact with her. Avoid events from Thanksgiving through mid January. I don’t enjoy being out and about then anyway. We won’t lie, but why invite trouble, when it always shows up of its own accord. Yet here I am writing it out on LJ and posting it public. I asked her. None of those kids should be reading my posts anyway, but somebody might. Does she care? She said to post. At 11 she is obviously a lot more immune to the reactions on this subject than she was at 5.

    Things I have been called (not in jest) because I do not celebrate Christmas have included:

    • Grinch
    • Scrooge
    • smart
    • lucky
    • heathen
    • crazy
    • child abuser

    Yes, I’ve been told it is child abuse to not have her celebrate Christmas. Some people have cried actual tears upon hearing that we don’t celebrate.

    One relative lets their kids think we are Jewish so they don’t have to explain something else.

    My MIL quit giving us birthday gifts. Oh wait. She didn’t quit. She has become chronically late with them. She sends us gifts at Christmas, wrapped in Christmas paper and writes Happy Birthday on the cards. In case you are wondering, our birthdays are in July.

    Mainly people want to know what we DO instead. We don’t do anything specific. We are glad to have a day when people don’t tend to call, and we often accomplish stuff around the house and catch up on to do list stuff. The only thing that makes it different from other days is the fact that other people are busy celebrating it. If we eat out, we don’t have many options, but we’ve learned that we can usually find a Chinese restaurant open.

  • No Thanks

    It’s just not that magic to me.

    At 17 I got my first job in retail. Being trapped inside the mall for the entire holiday season, both the purchases and returns, was, let’s call it “unpleasant”. Working with the general public was not something I enjoyed on a normal day, but during the holiday season everything went to extra utter shit. The number of temper tantrums increased tenfold. There were people fighting with strangers over who was getting the last of some dumb piece of crap.

    Even on sale, it is an ugly damn sweater ladies. If you don’t both stop yanking at it you are going to ruin it, It will then be my job to damage it out, and since I already have more than enough to do today cleaning up after you fucks, it is really not going to make me happy. Merry Christmas.

    The closer it got to the big day, the longer my work hours and the shorter the shoppers’ tempers. Best of all, school was out for vacation so most shoppers were dragging along all form of snotty, fussing, writhing, complaining, demanding, brat with them.

    People could talk all they wanted about the magic of the season, but I saw what they were really like, and the overwhelming majority were not swept up in tides of joy, nor did they feel goodwill toward mankind. They felt aggravated, rushed, pressured, frantic, crazed and entitled. It was just like the rest of the year, only amplified. In my book giving some canned peaches to the food drive does not even out treating everyone at the mall like shit.

    Giftmas

    It all comes down to the gifts. I’m not opposed to giving gifts and I am not opposed to receiving them. I am a firm believer in the saying “It’s the thought that counts”, but I don’t interpret it the same way most people do. I do not think that just any gift will do because at least it shows they thought of you for a second. That is what a card or a phone call or an email is for. A gift shows what they are thinking of you, and if that thought is “Oh shit! I forgot to get you something and I really think I should because it is X day tomorrow. I was already in line when I realized this, but here is a random piece of crap set near the register lines for exactly this purpose.” I honestly don’t want it. I also really don’t want to give gifts like that.

    When I am out and about in the course of my life (or sitting on my ass surfing the web, as the case may be), and I stumble upon something that makes me think of a particular person, that is a gift worth considering. I don’t want to not buy it because there isn’t an X day until 9 months in the future. I don’t want to buy it and hide it in my cluttered closet for 10 months and find it after X day has passed.

    My father was never much of a gift giver, so when I was a teen I began to do the Christmas shopping from US. My action + his money, both names on the card. I’d start early and put thought into each and every gift, but I was a teen and not overly in touch with a lot of people on our list, so I probably had more misses than hits. As the time grew closer and I’d remember the people we’d left of the list, I would scramble to get *something*. I understand how it happens. I just hated the way it felt. If I didn’t know somebody well enough to buy a gift for them that they would actually like… If they weren’t on my mind enough that I remembered them when I put together the list… Why exactly should I be buying a present for them anyway? Because they were going to buy one for me? This was only of benefit to the retailers.

    This much is being spent on this person, so this much should be spent on that person. More expensive is *better*. They spent this much on me last year. The Christmas advertisements started at the beginning of November (they now start at the end of September is some stores). I was saturated with the commercialization of Christmas and I just wanted to wring it out. I did not feel holiday cheer, I felt holiday stress.

    This was what I was going to raise our family on? Yes, children LOVE Christmas. Children are selfish creatures. Humans are selfish creatures and the young ones have learned to hide it less. People pile tons of presents on them and that makes it an enjoyable holiday to them, and they want more. It wasn’t exactly a traditional I felt gung ho about passing on.

    If I am going to a person’s house for dinner, I bring along a bottle of wine or some other consumable I know they will actually use. If I am a house guest, I make sure to take them out to a nice meal. I am all for manners and thanking people by treating them to something. I’m just not that into providing a wrapped item because of a certain date on the calendar. I try to make sure the people I care about know it every day. If they need a certain amount of money spent on a certain date to know it, they probably don’t know me well enough that they should be expecting a gift from me anyhow. If I am going to attend a wedding or birthday party, then I will make a point of having a gift in time for the event, or I don’t attend. Like I said, I am not anti gift or anti manners. I just don’t want to be part of frenzied gift exchanges.

    None of the memorable gifts I have gotten showed up on Christmas. Many of my favorites showed up out of the blue, just because somebody happened to be thinking of me. It might be the gift giving season, but please, nothing for me.

  • I’ll Have a Hot Buttered Rum

    I am not Christian. I understand that a lot of people around the world celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. Admittedly, I celebrated long after I realized I wasn’t Christian. Back when I decided to stop celebrating Christmas, I was still trying to achieve some sort of balance with certain factions of my blood relatives. They were very religious. It was an important holiday to them, and the secular celebration of it bothered them. I wanted to show some respect for their beliefs. I was planning to start a family of my own. I was trying to grasp what it was I was going to tell my child if I didn’t want to do the Jesus Christ’s birthday thing. I felt like it was more respectful of these relatives’ beliefs if I simply walked away from celebrating the holiday, rather than transforming it into a celebration of something that did fit into my world view better. In the intervening years I’ve gotten a far better picture of what those relatives, whose feelings I was worried about, really feel about me, and I am far less concerned now about trying to respect their beliefs. Still it did play a part in my decision.

    There is also a little thing oft referred to as family politics, as if regular politics weren’t ugly enough.

    My parents are divorced. They have been since I was very young. Where was I going for Christmas? Should I trade off every other year? Should I spend it with the one I wasn’t living with at the time? When I was a child they worked it out amongst themselves. If they argued about it, I was unaware or have blocked it out. I spent Christmas where I spent Christmas and probably got spoiled a little bit extra over the holidays because of it. I had fun with the people I was with. There were presents and twinkling lights, and a good many more sweets than I normally got to have. I missed the ones I wasn’t with. It was a “family holiday” and I was from a broken one.

    By the time I hit adolescence, the presents and the sweets mattered less to me. I was very aware I wasn’t Christian, although I wasn’t ready to tell people that yet. Instead I was trying to come to terms with this “Spirit of Christmas” or “Magic of Christmas” thing that people would go on about. It wasn’t what I saw. What I saw, was that the people who understood me, the people that I wanted to spend time with, were all stuck in a house with their relatives, while I was stuck in a house with my relatives. Yes, I was at that age when my peer group was becoming a stronger influence, than my parents. That was only part of it. I had also started to become a lot more aware of the various dynamics in the relationships around me, and I could see that I was not the only one who was not brimming with joy at every familial interaction. I was seeing things in the marriages of my relatives. I was hearing the exasperated tones. I noticed that people who rarely had a drink of alcohol had one for the holidays and that it was more a matter of dulling their senses than celebration. You shoved all the extendeds into one house together for a week and things got… tense. A game of Pictionary could end with somebody in tears, and I don’t mean one of the children. Once I was old enough to drive I would escape to spend time with my friends as soon as I could get away.

    When I met the person who would become my husband, it seemed inevitable that we would celebrate Christmas. We both always had. As we started to build our lives together we needed to sort out how we would celebrate the holiday as a family. As it happened, his parents divorced long ago too. So now we had 4 groups to choose from and no way to please everyone. It wasn’t just the basic 4 sets of our parents, we still had at least 1 grandparent living for each of those 4 parents.

    The first year we put up our own tree, which was fun and exciting. We got it for 5 bucks and had a lot of fun decorating. My mother bought us several very nice ornaments which was a gesture I really appreciate. We didn’t go visit her since she didn’t live locally. We had our own gift exchange at home, and we made some rounds to see the local friends and relatives.

    The next year my mother agreed to bring her family (both of my parents started new families after I was grown) to spend Christmas with us. I have to admit, this felt like a milestone. My mother and her family travelling to spend the holiday with us told me she believed I was a grown up, that she accepted my relationship, and knew I was really establishing my own household. It meant a lot to me. We got ourselves another 5 buck tree and decorated it. I planned my dinner menu (centered around a lamb roast). It would be our first Christmas that we were hosting. We also invited his mother and her husband. They said they would come. We did not invite my father over, who was also local. He had recently married a Buddhist they were still sorting out the Christmas thing. (I think now they celebrate it when they were spending it with my grandparents, and don’t otherwise, but I’m not certain. We have more interesting things to talk about.) This worked out better for us since we had a small apartment. On Christmas his mother didn’t call and didn’t show up. We waited a while and finally he called over to see when she’d be arriving, and she told him that she wasn’t feeling well.

    The next day we found out she was pissed off and offended that we were arrogant enough to think we could host our own Christmas. She had not gotten to have her own Christmas until she was married and had a child, and her son should come to her house for Christmas. The fact we had out of town guests did not figure into it. They were my guests.

    It became a bit of a thing, and she wouldn’t give us our gifts (including those by other people that were sent to her address) until we came to her house. At this point we were irritated and in the midst of a solidly petty and immature reaction ourselves, so we avoided going to her house completely. We’d meet for breakfast out at restaurants. It was many months until we ended up at and her house and got those gifts. Some were baked goods which were far from fresh at that point. Ghost of Christmas Past Shortbread Cookies, made with real butter and quite rancid.

    The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, literally and figuratively. To top it off, between the general stress of the season and the overwhelming workload of college life, we left the tree up long beyond the point of no return. We had managed to put the ornaments away, but once you pass the time that the garbage people will collect it on trash day, it became an effort to get rid of it. We didn’t have a truck to take it to the dump ourselves, and we were expending a lot of effort in a lot of other areas of our lives. The needles dried and many fell. The tree began to look much like a giant sized Charlie Brown tree. It stood as a reminder. When we got rid of it (way before we got those gifts, mind you) we knew it would be our last real tree. Before the next Christmas came along we’d already gotten the rest of the way through our decision making process. That was the last Christmas that we celebrated. It wasn’t particularly terrible. There were plenty of good parts to it. There just wasn’t the sort of personal meaning I was looking for.

  • Post 2 of The Things I Like Series

    When I was in the third grade, I wrote, directed and acted in my first play. Yes, I was a control freak from the start. When I got older I remained involved with theatre, but gave up on the acting part. As part of our program in college, you had to get on stage, so you knew what it was like from that side. I hated it from that side.

    From the other side, well it was quite a love/hate relationship. It continues to this day. At this moment I rarely do work, although I’ve had multiple people encouraging me to start volunteering at local theaters. It is tempting. I really love that line of work, except when I am hating it.

    Lately, I mostly remain an audience member. Often I am disturbed by the audience behavior. Turn off your damn phones. Don’t bring children if they cannot sit still and shut up. Don’t come yourself if you cannot sit still and shut up. Do they comprehend that the people up on stage can hear them?

    Some of the shows I watched in the past year were because I actively wanted a chance to see them. Others I saw based on the recommendations of friends. Others we attended because we knew somebody involved in the show. Sometimes I enjoy myself very little. Sometimes I enjoy myself immensely. Occasionally I can make it through an entire show without once thinking about how I would have done it differently. This year that actually happened multiple times, which was nice.

    A year in theatre (somewhat in order):

    “A Christmas Carol” (December 2005)
    “A North Hollywood Canteen Holiday”
    “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)”
    “The Argonauts”
    “The Block”
    “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”
    “Don’t Dress for Dinner”
    “Hairspray”
    “Usher”
    “Urinetown”
    “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”
    “The Real Inspector Hound”
    “Black Comedy”
    “Wicked”
    “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”
    “Proof”
    “Sluts! The Musical”
    “Aesop’s Falables”
    “A Christmas Carol” (December 2006)

    The most recent “A Christmas Carol” that we attended (and we still have one more version of it to see this year) was put on at a private Christian school. I only found out where we were going an hour before we needed to leave the house. Not that knowing would have changed my agreement to go, it just would have changed my expectations a bit earlier. I thought we were going to a public high school production. It was a nice production. They obviously had a solid amount of money for costumes and actually did some very nice things with the set. I have to say I was impressed with the set. They were selling expensive jewelry outside to benefit the program and having a silent auction in the lobby as well. I suppose that is how they afford the nice costumes. There was the fairly typical mixture of talent levels for a school show. There were several nice singing voices. Overall, the whole accent thing did not go well, and I do not think the director should have had them attempt it. The show was performed in the school chapel. I have not been in a chapel since I worked as a wedding photographer. The pews were padded which was nice, but every little thump and movement carried all the way down, so the guy at the end of the row was irritating the crap out of me with his constant fidgeting. One of the many problems with having a very bad back is being quite sensitive to having seats knocked and shook. All in all, it was solid for a school production. They did Christian it up a, Jesus was mentioned multiple times during the play and the ghosts were termed “Angelic Spirits” first and thereafter were always referred to as spirits, never ghosts. I guess ghosts is a negative.

    When the play was finally over (this tale is one that I am extremely familiar with, and not one of my favorites to start, so it is no reflection on the show or anyone in it that I was happy to see it pass), I was thrilled because I was hungry for dinner, and more importantly I needed to find the restroom. I was unable to make a rapid exit because the lights immediately came up and the sermon and prayer session began. That hasn’t happened to me at a play before. I would seriously prefer it not happen again.