I went shopping last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I know, I know. But Wing Chun needed Christmas cards, and so did I, and we figured that that whole embrace-that-which-you-most-fear principle had to work for us on some level, so we girded our loins for battle. You know that scene in the movie Godspell when the apostles round the corner in the empty city, carrying Christ’s body, and all of a sudden it’s a rush-hour scene and the sidewalk is totally packed? Welcome to our day. In fact, welcome to my neighborhood from now until the first week of January. Well, except for the part about Christ’s body, but let’s face it, Christmas shopping has about as much to do with Christ as the Republican Party’s so-called Christian values do – in other words, nothing at all. I don’t know the Bible backwards and forwards by any means, but I don’t recall any parables about fitting a retailing bonanza through the eye of a needle. Maybe it’s in one of the newer translations.

I like the holidays, don’t get me wrong. I like turkey and presents and mistletoe and ‘nog and Christmas carols and Hanukkah chocolate coins and cheap jokes at the expense of Kwanzaa (see what I just did there? And don’t send me hate mail – I can completely respect the desire of African-Americans for a winter holiday that’s theirs and not bound by Euro-Christian traditions, I really can, but the word “Kwanzaa” is funny. I think it’s the “K.” One time, a boss of mine sent out a “happy holidays” e-mail in which he wished the whole department a “Bonne Kwanzaa,” and it still cracks me up thinking about it. But if Kwanzaa had a name without a “K,” like “Serawaa” or something oh, forget it, I sound like a total racist now) and candy canes and the joy of giving and so on, but I like those things on the holidays themselves, not for a two-month period surrounding the holidays. Like, fine, let’s all go home to our families and stuff our faces in true red-white-and-blue American style, and let’s even take a moment to feel crappy about the fact that our forefathers rewarded the Native Americans for saving them from starvation by giving them guns and booze and Western disease and herding them onto scrapey plots of land that they couldn’t cultivate and saying all condescendingly, “Sorry about that – but hey, casinos!” and patting them all imperialistically on the head, and then let’s do twenty-eight thousand dishes and get into arguments about why we haven’t gotten married yet and who took the leg I always get the leg I hate the kids’ table Billy’s pinching me I can’t believe your father’s drunk already the pie tastes like buckshot shhh don’t say anything she’s old she forgets to put in the sugar sometimes blah blah blah BLAH, and then let’s fall asleep in front of the football, wake up, drink a cup of coffee, go home, and get on with our lives until Christmas Eve (or the first night of Hanukkah, or the solstice, or whatever). I mean, really, people. Don’t you just sit there among the wreckage of the Thanksgiving turkey, looking down the barrel of the next month of holiday hype and overeating and credit-card debt, and wish you lived on a remote island, an island far enough away from any sort of television signal that you would never ever have to see Joe Namath pimping digital camcorders for (Nobody Beats) The Wiz and wearing that snowflake sweater that looks like Rudolph ate a sheep and then threw it back up? How many times have you torn open a square envelope, muttering to yourself, “Oh, great. Another fucking Christmas party,” knowing that if you attend said party, the hostess will give you guff for not wearing enough “festive holiday attire,” and of course you didn’t, because the hostess herself has on every piece of holiday flair in the entire county, including blinking twinkling earrings that play “Deck The Halls” in three languages and about two hundred red and green hairbows, and you think to yourself that she looks like a fleshy tree decorated by the kid from Gummo while pointing glumly at the tiny, tasteful wreath pin affixed to your coat’s lapel, and she squeals, “But that’s TINY, you can barely seeeeeee iiiiiiiiiit,” and the only other person you can stand who got invited to this party hasn’t shown up, so you stand there by a bowl of red and green M&Ms the size of Lake Michigan and hope that a masked gunman shows up and ends your misery, or at least that you can find someone amenable to accepting twenty dollars in exchange for drowning you in the punch?

And then there’s the shopping. Or should I say “the politics of the shopping,” which means that you have to guess how high your friends and family plan to shoot this year price-wise, and match it, or someone will wind up feeling humiliated – usually you, by the way – and if you just started dating someone recently, whether you should spring for the first-edition Hemingway he has his eye on, or expect that he will affix novelty mistletoe to his belt and then “treat you” to dinner at Gray’s Papaya, and what about your dad? Your dad wants nothing; your dad needs nothing. Your dad is like a solar panel when it comes to gifts – he runs under his own power. He has expressed the opinion that he might need new socks and boxer shorts. Not a wish, mind you. An opinion. Socks. Boxer shorts. You refuse to buy your dad boxer shorts. It crosses a line. Your mother is no help. “He doesn’t really need anything.” And so you find yourself in Barnes & Noble at 10:18 pm on Christmas Eve, scouring the shelves for that one book on golf that he does not already own, and you finally hit paydirt with a slim volume – more of a pamphlet, really – called Golfing Kuwait: Avoiding The Sand Traps, and the next morning, your brother regards you smugly while your dad opens his gift, the titanium-plated barbecue fork with built-in thermometer, timer, and GPS capability up to twenty feet underwater which you saw in the Sharper Image catalog and laughed at because, well, it costs four hundred dollars and, um, it’s totally stupid. And your dad loves it. Your attempts to change your name and move to another state before your dad gets around to opening Golfing Kuwait fail. Later, you will have this conversation with your cousin:

“Oh, MAN! [Cack.] This candied orange peel tastes like HOT ASS. Who eats this crap?”

“Dad. And your dad.”

“What? No, they don’t. How could they? It’s so nast!”

“Grandma made it.”

“It still tastes like poo.”

“Oh, I kind of like it.”

“Grandma’s standing right behind me, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Yes, she is.”

“Want to go for a drive? To Iowa?”

“I’ll get my coat.”

Of course, the winter holidays offer the aspiring actors in the crowd the opportunity to hone their acting skills with a little workshop I like to call “Introductory Effusive Gratitude.” It’s offered in conjunction with our economics department, which lists it in its course catalog as “Staying In The Will.” I don’t want to gyp the paying customers by giving too much away here, but let’s just say that a quick reaction time is key. If you take too much time to think, the jig is up. Let’s do a quick visualization exercise, shall we? Close your eyes, and think of the chaos of your living room on Christmas morning. Your sister’s four-year-old has already thrown up three times from the excitement, you can’t see the carpeting what with all the wrapping paper everywhere, and your mother doesn’t have anything in the house except Postum and refuses to let you make a Starbucks run. Ready? Okay, here comes your Aunt Helen. She’s carrying what looks like a box from a department store, probably Strawbridge’s, and you suspect that she got whatever’s inside the box at the after-Christmas sale last year. She’s got that expectant, pre-“you’re going to loooove thiiiiis”-trill look. Imagine yourself taking the box and smiling sweetly and thanking her for thinking of you. Now, your finger is sliding under the tape and tearing the wrap off and opening the box. Remember, time is of the essence here. Ready?

Reindeer socks. GO!

Socks! SOCKS! Just what you NEEDED! You simply ADORE them, how festive and adorable, you’re out of the chair and motoring over to Aunt Helen to give her a kiss on the cheek, and then you’re going to put these gosh-darn cute socks on RIGHT AWAY! None of that “socks? I oh, I just these are ” business. Love them. LOVE THEM. Love them immediately and wholly. Wear them all day. Peel them off and chuck them in the trash after Aunt Helen goes home. Two years later, she dies and you get that armoire you had your eye on. It’s a small price to pay. Also, you spare her feelings, and that’s really the point. Well, ostensibly.

But all of this comes later. First, you’ve got survive a month of standing in various retail outlets listening to the fourth Podunk Tabernacle rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful” of the day while a woman in line ahead of you holds up the show by asking how long she has to return a pair of Underoos she’s buying for her grandson, and why Underwear Lady couldn’t have hassled the retail workers in her hometown instead of taking the train into Manhattan to do it instead, you don’t know, and you don’t understand why she thinks she can return a pair of BOY’S UNDERPANTS, like, ewwww, and furthermore, you will give her enough money to buy as many pairs of Underoos as she wants and a new black-market grandson to boot if she’ll just get the fuck out of your way so that you can pull your cringing American Express card out of your pocket and buy your mother-in-law the forty-eight-pound, twenty-eight-hundred-page, special-ordered Atkins Diet cookbook your husband swears she wants and will stop hating you and making snide comments about when you plan to get pregnant if you give it to her, throw it on a hand cart, and drag it out to the curb, mowing down every stroller in your path and trying to ignore the little snippets of conversation you hear from the line to see Santa, and while you attempt to hail a cab and wonder to yourself what kind of a caretaker tells a three-year-old that “Santa has killed for less,” you wonder why we make such a big deal out of the Christmas holidays when not one single world religion considers it the height of its faith, and why the Duane Reade on the corner doesn’t just leave that fugly tinsel up all year if they’re going to put it up on November FOURTH for God’s sake, and a family blows past you on the sidewalk all arguing over whether they can find what they need in Foot Locker, and you flash back to the Christmas season when you spent a week and a half and a good four inches of shoe leather hitting every shoe store between Battery Park and Central Park, looking for a pair of Puma Clydes in red, size thirteen, all on the off chance that your brother really meant it when he admired yours, and then he opened them Christmas morning and yelled for joy and wore them until they disintegrated.

You flash back to all the times as a child when you sat in the choir loft during the early service, which was, is, and forever shall be complete pandemonium until they turn the lights out, and you sang your heart out on the German verse of “Silent Night” and giggled quietly with your friends and then the lights went down to just candles and the sexton threw his cigarette in the bushes and ran inside to ring the bell and you felt all silent inside and awed by the mystery of Christ’s birth, one of the best underdog stories ever told. You flash back to the Christmas Eves when you had to sleep on the mud porch because the house was bursting with relatives, and you couldn’t sleep because you were excited, and you muttered to yourself that if you had to almost freeze to death then you’d damn well better get a pony, or at least a good Barbie, the one with the super-long hair, and then all of a sudden you woke up and morning had come and you rumbled downstairs and discovered that – with the exception of the pony – your parents had guessed your heart. You remember finding out that your dad nibbled the carrot every year just so to make it look gnawed on by a reindeer, so that you and your brother wouldn’t find out that it was him and not Rudolph and Santa who ate the cookies and greens you left out. You remember the time your cousin made her entrance into the house for Christmas, after a 14-hour car ride, by puking in the foyer, and how your whole family still jokes about it (“Hi, everyone, merry HOARRRRF!”) and makes her blush, and how your dad and his brothers would mill around in the kitchen “doing the dishes” (read: smoking and snapping each other with dishtowels and teasing your grandmother until she cried laughing), and how you’d come into the kitchen (read: your mom’s sanctum) after all the present-opening had died down and give your mom a big hug and tell her you loved her and thanks for the Barbie with the super-long hair, and she’d tell you she loved you too, and she’d whisper into your hair for you to “get your grandma out of here, she’s driving me crazy” so you’d haul your grandma off to play Barbies with you on the floor, and you remember the all-ages pillow fight in the basement one year when your cousin B whomped you in the face with the zipper side of a pillow, and you refused to cry out of pride, but you really wanted to get him, so you whipped a little lacy pillow at him but he ducked out of the way and then gloated about it, “Missed me! Missed me! Jersey Buntings suuuuu-uuuck!” and then out of nowhere your brother frizzed a giant seat cushion at B and knocked him over the back of the couch and said all matter-of-factly, “Jersey Buntings got you that time, butthole,” and you said thanks, and he said in that same blasÈ tone, “You owe me, Sar,” right before an arm appeared over the back of the couch and skifffff! bonked your bro on the back of the head with a tapestry pillow: “Jersey Bunting fuckers!” And after the pillow fight, your youngest cousin ran upstairs to give your uncle a hug and almost knocked his fillings out because she’d attracted about a jigowatt of electrical charge from all the pillows and scrabbling around on the carpet and whatnot.

So, you and the cookbook that has its own zip code make your way home. You smile to yourself thinking of all these things, of the perfect timing of that huge square seat cushion arcing through the air and wasting B, of B’s arm taking its revenge, of your Aunt V’s Christmas-cookie tray and the excuses you’d all make to detour past its home in the pantry about seven times a day, and people look at you strangely because the sidewalk is jammed and it’s freezing and you’re chuckling away to yourself, and you get home and move the furniture so you can wrap the cookbook, and the cats “help” (read: get tape stuck to their paw pads and hop around offendedly, then pounce on the ribbon like little kittens), and you have a big old epiphany about Christmas – that it’s like life, that you have to wade through acres of fa-la-la and tough ham and post-office lines to get to the good stuff like pillow fights and hanging out with your grandma, that the pillow fights and the grandma-hanging-out-with will get you through the fa-la-la and the tough ham later on. That, next week, when you go back out to return the cookbook because your mother-in-law got two copies and you have to stand in a line longer than David Crosby’s hair to get a store credit, you’ll remember tonight and how you laughed when you tried to tie a big Christmas bow around the cat’s neck. That it still does mean something.

Yikes.

Barf.

Now you’re talking.

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