The iPad 3

The Ghost of Christmas Future is about ready to knock down my front door with a barrage of television ads and gingerbread lattes. And he'll knock louder and louder as the days go by.

There will be traffic accidents, screaming customers, fist fights, road rage, credit card debt, layaway plans, obligations to buy gifts for people at the office, and then suddenly... there will be an awed hush on Christmas day.

Stores will be closed. Parking lots will be empty. Schools will be abandonded. Streets will only be trickling with a few randomly distributed cars as they make their way home. Smoke will rise from chimneys. The smell of fresh baked ham will permeate neighborhood streets. And for a few hours the animals will contemplate taking back the cities as their own land.

Then the next day there will be traffic accidents, screaming customers, fist fights, road rage, credit card declines, gift card declines, returns, regifting the things we got from people at the office, and then suddenly... we'll make some new year's resolutions to be better people.

And we do all of this because of one day out of the year.

Christmas, like the iPhone, is just another example of how controllable we humans are by the power of suggestion. I'm actually quite certain that if the devil were to come to Earth he would manifest himself in the form an iPad 3.

I've known some pretty cool Jehova's Witnesses who really opened my eyes. They told me they give gifts to each other on random days just for the hell of it. And I said to them, " Wait... you give gifts out of appreciation instead of obligation? What kind of fucked up religion is that?"

There's no law that states we will have our citizenship revoked if we celebrate Christmas on another day. We celebrate on December 25th because everyone else does it. We just do it because retailers tell us we should. God forbid we buy gifts for our friends and family any other day of the year. Jesus might come down from heaven, ripping his clothes off of his body in an Incredible-Hulk-like display of rage, and throw down the script he had written entitled "Earth!" to show us where we fucked up our lines.

That would never happen, of course. Christmas isn't about Jesus.

'Tis the Season

I don't know about you people (and I'm not saying that because all of my readers are black), but I'm getting a little tired of having Christmas thrust in my face like a stripper's money-hungry, pine-scented crotch the day after Halloween.

We're now celebrating Christmas for a full two months before its calendar date. That's one sixth of the year that is devoted to Christmas. During the Christmas season, I'll get two oil changes.

I predict that twenty years from now the Christmas season will begin immediately following Labor Day.

Christmas is by far the most greed-fueled holiday in the entire Milky Way galaxy. When I think about Jesus and the things he taught us, I don't remember the part about punching someone in the spleen in order to get the last Call of Duty game. It's ironic that we celebrate the birth of someone who taught us about love, compassion, sacrifice, and forgiveness this way.

I'm not even a religious man, but I know hypocrisy when I see it. That's why I'm proposing a new set of rules for how Christmas is to be celebrated.

1. Instead of presents, we will exchange children for the day and force them to act out scenes from 'Total Recall'.

2. Instead of cutting down trees to put in our living rooms, we'll hang up pictures of Katy Perry made entirely of macaroni.

3. Instead of Christmas music, we'll only be able to listen to recordings of great political debates reenacted by Patrick Stewart and Oscar the Grouch.

4. Instead of putting lights on our houses, we'll stick catnip in our pants.

5. And instead of kissing someone every time we step beneath mistletoe, we'll cover ourselves in chicken broth every time someone says the word 'cynicism'.