From what I can tell it's kind of the standard end-of-year complaint that Christmas seems to rear it's ugly, pseudo-religious head earlier and earlier every year. This year in particular the complaint seems to be more common than usual, and I can certainly understand. Did anyone honestly notice Halloween? Didn't it just go by in a flash? I mean I'll admit I don't do much myself at that time of year other than the standard of packing hallucinogens into mini Mars Bars and watching the ensuing chaos from the roof of my house ("It's a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages", I loudly proclaim as they stuff me into a police van), but SOMETHING usually occurs. It's the only time of year when people hand sweets out to children from their front doors instead of nervously from the open door of a still running car outside a primary school, and yet it's gone.
So who killed Halloween? It was Christmas what did it! Must've been. He's the only one with a motive. Christmas is the time of year when happiness and joy is forced on you like an angry ex-boyfriend, but only after it has gradually and efficiently sucked the life and soul out of you for weeks before eventually forcing you to socialize with the very people you put yourself through this hell for in the first place. People pack themselves into shops and supermarkets like maggots in a festering wound, only the thin blue line of the law stopping most of them from gouging each other's eyes out for that last pack of chipolatas wrapped in bacon. Meanwhile a man on the radio sings about how he wishes it could be Christmas every day as you stand at the self-service, silently lamenting that it isn't, as of yet, possible to punch sound waves.
Christmas certainly does have the motive because Halloween was the one time of year that asked us to embrace our darkness rather than hide it behind the gritted, toothy smile of a medicated crocodile. It told us to drench ourselves in blood, twist ourselves into abominable forms, turn our children into monsters and then set them loose on the streets, and it told us to carve mangled faces into pumpkins to tell the evil spirits to fuck off because you know what? We're scarier than you! We've killed more of us in immensely heinous ways than any of you "ethereal" pussies ever have or ever will! What have you done exactly? You knocked over a lamp. Ooooh! Scary! Here's a laughing fruit you cunts!
Halloween was a time where we could make reference to our own deranged psyches in a fun and cathartic fashion. Ghosts, goblins, demons, witches, vampires, zombies; they were always ourselves reflected in a funhouse mirror. Halloween made it safe to be a monster for a night. But Christmas can't have that. No, it wants you to bottle it all up and let it seethe under a rictus grin and a jolly carol. I guarantee you more people have killed and been killed on Christmas than Halloween. I'm not even going to look that up because I'm so certain I'm correct in that baseless assumption.
The ironic thing though; Christmas has always been scarier than Halloween. Think about it; the stressful management of finances, the prospect of a sudden and serious family meltdown at the dinner table, the same songs playing over and over and over again in a display of aural insanity....
And at the end of it all, a heavy set, alcoholic mountain man sneaks into your house in the dead of night, creeps into your room and leaves little "gifts". The kicker to all this though; he's been watching you. The whole time. All year. Studying your behavior to determine whether you've been "naughty"... or "nice."
And we did it all for a God Zombie.
 |
| MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! |
No comments:
Post a Comment