As some of you may have guessed, my thoughts on Christmas are a little conflicted. It's not like I have a vendetta against it like some people think. I mean, good for them. They managed to co-opt the solstice celebration. I'm not crazy about it, but it's not like I don't put up a tree and a few wreaths.

The thing that drives me nuts is the Santa Claus thing. Namely the notion that I invented Santa Claus to take the spotlight off Jesus during his birthday. Some say his name is "Santa" because it's just "Satan" with the "N" placed in front of the "T". I feel slightly insulted by the notion that I can turn into a serpent on a whim and tempt Eve out of paradise, but that when concocting a campaign to influence every Christian child in the world for hundreds of years I would just spell my name with a few letters switched around.

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Christmas. Yeah, we're going there. I never said this would be a smooth ride. Christmas is of course the celebration of the day Jesus was born and placed in a manger because there was "no room at the inn". Seriously?  Who was running this inn? Messianic prophecy or not, it's a couple who had a baby 5 minutes ago, you can't make some space? Hell wouldn't even pull that shit, and we're talking about a place that dedicates an entire high-rise to gleefully forcing glass shards under the eyelids of false witnesses.

Christmas is also the beginning of Christmastide, the so-called 12 days of Christmas, made famous in the song of the same name. Allow me to take a breath before going into this one. Let's think about this. The first 4 days, the singer's "true love" - and I put that in quotations because I'm not sure I buy that designation for reasons I'll explain - gives her (Yeah, her. I've lived so long I stopped counting my age when we went from Roman to Arabic numerals, and I can tell you this: chicks don't buy guys multiple swans. Sorry boys, ain't gonna happen.) a partridge (with tree), 2 turtle doves, 3 french hens, and 4 colly birds. The song seems to suggest that these things are stacked every day, so on the first day it's a partridge in a pear tree, and on the second day it's 2 turtle doves and a second partridge in a pear tree, and so on. I'm going to assume that's not the case, and that each subsequent mentioning of a gift is a reference to the original, and not a duplicate gift. If I'm wrong, then what I took to be merely absurd is actually whatever is above absurd. Preposterous?

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Well, it's happened again. You've blasted through another year and suddenly it's Thanksgiving again. We do a big Thanksgiving down here. It's a good holiday for a diverse crowd, since it's secular and you don't really need to explain much, even to people who have never heard of it. Have a big feast, open a few bottles of wine. Everybody "gets it". And holidays that center around cooking are big in Hell, since heat is easy to come by in a lake of fire that burns hotter than the hottest earthly flame.

I'm hosting this year like I always do. It used to be a real treat for everyone to come to my place, since I lived in the most exclusive neighborhood in all of Hell. Guests would make jokes like "What's the cover charge going to be?" But while my neighborhood was nice when I moved in, it's pretty shitty now. One of the hazards of eternity, I guess, unless you want to move every hundred years. Now the place is really run down and all the businesses have left. I knew we'd hit the skids when I drove by a Souplantation with my neighbor Ron and he said, without irony, "It would be really cool if we could get one of those". It's come to that. Now people make jokes like "Yeah, we'll be there, just let me get my flak jacket out of the attic".

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In every life comes a moment of sheer terror at the realization that you're grown up. The dream of becoming an astronaut, basketball player, or rock star is content to remain a dream, and if you die today, people will remember you as a bank teller, or a CPA, or a guy who collects souls and casts sinners into a lake of fire.

So you come up with a plan, like selling your own hot sauce, or taking up yoga, or, worst of all, you decide to write a memoir because someone lent you Zinsser's On Writing Well. Then you come to the second moment of sheer terror, and this one's even worse than the first, because it's when you realize you're having a mid-life crisis, and that means you're a cliché. You sink deeper into the hole. You feel trapped.

You consider buying a Mustang. Then you think about the memoir idea, and you realize that memoirs are about the past, and you're too young to think about the past. Thinking about the past is for an old man, you need something that's about the present, something that's for a young man. And suddenly you're looking at options you didn't even know existed two weeks ago. You're saying the word "blog" in conversation with a straight face and no one seems to mind. Next thing you know, you're blogging. Suddenly there's pressure to produce something good, and you feel like you're at work, but you're not even getting paid. And if someone were to ask you "Why didn't you just take up surfing?" you would have no answer.

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