I am a Christmas Failure

By Nathan Lindberg

Christmas is a wonderful time of year when everything is wondrous and special and magical and stuff. Which is why it sucks.

Christmas is so magical it makes me feel stupid. I rarely feel magical, especially in the morning. In fact, when I wake up I feel, and look, extremely unmagical, even on Christmas. Which makes me feel even less than unmagical. Because I'm supposed to feel magical, and I don't, so I end up feeling sub-unmagical. And you can't get less joyous than that.

Sometimes you have to work on Christmas, or you have to work the day after Christmas, which is almost as bad depending on how much magical eggnog you drink on Christmas Day. Sometimes you don't feel like hanging out and being magical and wonderful with people. Sometimes you just feel ordinary on Christmas. Then you’re a Christmas failure.

Christmas must be the most wondrous time of year. If you feel just ordinary, you are obviously doing something wrong. If you don't have the Christmas spirit, you are like the mean old people on Christmas cartoons.

Even this blog should be warm and wonderful and magical. I should talk about how commercialized everything is and how we really need to think of all the wonderful parts of Christmas like sharing and caring and borrowing money through treasury bonds to send to Afghanistan: i.e. money black hole. I should tell people of all the wonderful things we have to be thankful for and how we all love each other and are glad for the Tea Party. Maybe I should come up with some magical story. Or maybe I should talk about how special it is to be patriotic and drive a large truck. Instead I'd like to talk about how I'm actually looking forward to January.

It's too easy to fail at Christmas. You don’t spend enough money on your kid. Your gift for your spouse was not difficult enough to buy. You burn the figgy pudding. You accidently blurt out in public how much you hate Christmas music. You drink too much hot buttered rum before the church Christmas play and wish you were a Jehovah’s Witness. Last, you get your credit card bill before the holidays are over.

If you really want to capture the Christmas spirit, you should buy everyone, including your mailman, plumber and proctologist, gifts. And you should bake cookies and send out cards before January and put up decorations and buy your kids better gifts than last year and if you don't… you must be a Christmas failure.

Christmas success is something some people work on all year. They start buying presents in July. They plan their dinner in October. They get cards ready in November. Those people think they are going to be Christmas dynamos, but they are even more prone to failure. After all those hours of work, something as stupid as one drunk uncle at the Christmas party can ruin everything, and then an entire year of planning goes down the drain.

My friend Dale always gives me the perfect present. He buys a six pack of beer, gives it to me and then asks for one. Then we sit and drink and talk about football or 2 X 4s or something. Together we are absolute Christmas failures. And it really feels nice. Not magical, just nice.

By Nathan Lindberg