Look at your calendar. Now back to me. Now back at your calendar. Now back to me. What is that on your calendar? It looks like a Big Day known by capitalists as The Christmas. The Christmas is the official birthday party of our Lord and Saviour Santa Claus, and is a day on which people will give you many novelty toques and socks and dildos shaped like Santa hats. You don’t want any of those things though. Those gifts are terrible. Here is a list of things you actually want for Christmas:
1. Your noisy neighbours to shut the fuck up
Your neighbours have already slid a broken cookie in a baggie and a card they made with the face of Grumpy Cat on it under your door, but you don’t want that crap. What you want is to stop hearing Kim Kardashian’s voice at top volume screeching through the walls every Friday night at 4 a.m. What you want is the sanctity of your Tuesday morning breakfast restored, sans pounding dubstep. Maybe next year they can even give you the gift of not calling the landlord every weekend when you throw your weekly rager.
2. Your bigot uncle to stop talking forever
You know your bigot uncle. The one who always shows up to Christmas dinner with a ten dollar bill and a box of gas-station cigars for you, wrapped in newspaper. What is that bullshit? You don’t know where he found a gas station that sells cigars and you don’t care. You’d actually just rather he stop arguing with you about how “those people” are nothing but trouble. Or, at the very least, stop posting outdated slurs to your Facebook timeline. You have a Fashionably Liberal Reputation to uphold here, okay?
3. Your grandmother to stop asking if you are still single
Every year your grandma knits you an itchy sweater with an animal like a penguin on it and even though that hipster shit is cool now, you don’t want these fukken sweaters. You would prefer it if she would just stop asking, “What happened to that nice guy you were seeing? You know, I really was sure he was the one for you. Why are you not concentrating on creating more intentional monogamous energy in your life?” (Your grandmother is kind of new-agey.)
We get it, Grandma. When you were our age you already had a mortgage and three kids. But this is the future! We are the Student Debt Generation. The people of Netflix and Chill. Besides, nothing is more festive than swiping Tinder dates under the Christmas dinner table.
4. The Christmas-industrial complex to stop being such a jerk
And while I’m at it, can Big Christmas just stop screwing us over? Every year those who participate are promised “peace” and “love” and “joy” but we mostly just get a statistical increase in stress-related illness and domestic violence. Besides, Christmas is just an outdated Christian holiday that’s been incorporated into the Neo-Colonial Capitalist Machine. Even if you celebrate a different holiday, or just focus on the simple pleasures this holiday season, you’ll still probably have to deal with crowded shopping malls and angrier-than-usual drivers and the Rising Price of Everything. Maybe we’d all be better off if we just gave up on Christmas and play Prince’s Christmas album all year round. At least that way nobody would have to skim shitty, presumptuous, problematic articles like this hoping for just one honest-to-goodness gift idea buried somewhere under the steaming pile of satire.
You know what? Who wants to waste energy and money on thoughtful gifts for their loved ones anyways? It turns out that, aside from that one Bing Crosby song I like, Neo-Christmas is actually kind of a crap holiday. Maybe we’d be better off if we asked our loved ones to leave off gift-giving altogether and focused on being better, kinder humans or some shit instead. Because nothing says “I love you,” quite like saying, “Fuck the man and also I am super cheap.”
