If All The Year Were Playing Holidays...

      Ah, 'tis the season. Christmas looms on the horizon, and Doctor J is wrought with a sense of dread he thinks very much akin to the dread felt by those during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ah, yes, waste and destruction lay ahead. As I said to a friend today, shopping is like a recantation: probably inevitable, but something definitely to be left until the last minute (Do not go gentle into that good mall / Rage, rage, against the dying of the fall!). It's also, sadly, a holiday more or less bereft of actual genrousity which is, as the Bard has said, more common in the breach than in the observance. It's really more about titting-for-tatting and social and familiar appeasements. Cynical? Me? No, definitely not. Okay, yes I am, and I bear it proudly. I am defiantly cynical in this regard. Thank goodness. Commodious, commercialized Christmas, from hell's still-beating heart, I stab at thee!

      Okay, perhaps I exaggerate. (Or perhaps not.) Christmas is a scutcheon, he writes, channelling Falstaff. It's time, alas, to begin dragging oneself to stores and shopping malls, to step into Thunderdome, environmentally ensconced by sickeningly saccharine seasonal songs and socially-clueless fellow shoppers scrambling for stocking stuffers with the ferocity of vultures swooping down on carrion. It's time to suppress all of my misanthropic tendencies and pretend, however failingly, this is the season of sweetness and light, of hugs and presents and egg-nog. 'Tis the season to be facetious, tra la la la la, la la de da. As I steel my condition for the shopping scene, I must remember to dig out my machete before I have to participate in a slaughter of Kurosawan proportions. Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!