Ya Know What I Was Thinking?

#1 - Mattress sales. In the US, any and every holiday is apparently accompanied by widespread sleeplessness. Has to be, because every holiday there is a veritable plethora of mattress sales. If there so much to do and so many people are travelling, where's all the wear and tear on the mattresses coming from?! Maybe from people getting drunk and passing out on them with a stupendous flop.

#2 - Reverse fortune-chasing. It seems that everyone is determined to outspend each other during holidays. In the summer, people spend into the thousands on fireworks, and in the colder months, they send themselves to the doorstep of the poorhouse for gifts to people who probably don't even want the stuff anyway. Perhaps we should make an annual game out of it. Everybody draws from a deck, and the cards have dollar values on them. The goal is to waste as much money as is represented in your cards as quickly and irrevocably as possible—no fair keeping receipts for returns! The game will be a hit: we'll call it "Oh-No" instead of "Uno!"

#3 - Smallywood tsunami. Rom-coms and Hallmark Christmas movies on TV are my guilty pleasure. (And ABBA. But I'm finding a lot of heavy metal kids are closet ABBA fans. And that's beside the point.) Regarding the annual flood of these movies, one wonders what the allure is. It's basically the same three movies: the commoner turned princess; opposites attract; a Christmas wish. And it's really the same 17 actors and actresses in each one of them, too. I have to give them a respect, by the way. They are some serious workaday folks, trying their best to play a slightly different character in each cookie-cutter movie. These people put their shoulder to the wheel... er, the sleigh rail, I suppose. In any case, I like to watch them to see who's acting well, see which stories are actually decent stories. There's a couple of actresses in those movies that really get into their characters—good criers; and the older I get the closer I'm built to the water, as my mother would say, so they sometimes surprise me into having an actual emotion, which is certainly not what the holidays are about. No way. In fact...

#4 - Honesty. Sike! Time for fish stories (from non-fisherpersons), tales about how we told so-and-so at the office what a motormouth he is (from those of us who wouldn’t say boo to a mouse), and boasts about The Big Raise (which was absolutely nullified by #2 above).

#5 - Exhaustion. If you're not worn out by the time you go back to work, you've not celebrated your holiday the correct way. A holiday is about scrambling, travelling, buying, cooking, cleaning, dressing, buying, undressing, dressing again, arguing, crying, buying, and swearing this is the last holiday you'll go to if your spouse's annoying cousin is going to be there.

#6 - Cookouts. Whether it's hotdogs in the sun or oil-boiled turkeys in the snow, it's not a holiday without fire. (For some reason, keeping the fire in the fireplace doesn't count, either; I haven't figured that one out yet.)

#7 - Avoiding the landmines of Remembrance, Love and Peace. I see little true remembrance on remembrance days; more angst and anger than love during birthdays and thanksgiving days; less peace than ever during Christmas. Maybe this is how holidays started; I guess it's not too hard to envision a couple of Native Americans riding away from the first thanksgiving, one saying to the other: "If Duerfell Smith's cousin, what's-his-name, is going to be there again next year, I'll scalp him myself!"