Posted on 12/04/2004 2:10:20 PM PST by Pokey78
If I hear "Frosty the Snowman" one more time, I'll rip his frozen face off.
It's a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of "Ring, Christmas Bells" drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates.
I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas.
Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year.
"You're weird," my mom says. This from a woman who once left up our Christmas tree until April 3, and who listens to a radio station that plays carols 24/7 all month.
My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house. There's a mouse Santa Claus and mouse Mrs. Claus and mice elves and a miniature Christmas village with mice, and some rat Cinderella coachmen in pink waistcoats and rats in red velvet vests and more rats, wearing frilly red-and-white nightshirts and nightcaps and holding little candles, leading you up the steps to bed. It's beyond creepy. I keep fretting that it's going to be like "Willard" meets "The Nutcracker," where they come alive and eat her like a Christmas pudding.
My mom and sister both blissfully sat through "It's a Wonderful Life" again on Thanksgiving weekend, while even hearing a mere snatch of that movie makes me want to scarf down a fistful of antidepressants - and join all the other women in America who are on a holiday high - except our family doctor is a Scrooge about designer drugs, leaving me to self-medicate as Clarence gets his wings with extra brandy in the eggnog.
I've given a lot of thought to why others' season of joy is my season of doom - besides the obvious fact that yuppies have drenched the holidays in ever more absurd levels of consumerism.
I think it has to do with how stressed out my mom and sister would get on Christmas Day when I was little. I remember them snapping at me; they seemed tense because of all the aprons to be sashed and potatoes to be mashed. (In our traditional Irish household, women slaved and men were waited on.)
It might be exacerbated by the stress I feel when I think of all the money I've spent on lavishing boyfriends with presents over the years, guys who are now living with other women who are enjoying my lovingly picked out presents which I'm no doubt still paying for in credit card interest charges.
I was embracing my Christmas black dog the other day when I read a Times article so scary it made my hair - and my genes - curl.
It was about how severe stress can make a woman age very rapidly and prematurely, looking years older than her chronological age, because the stress causes the DNA in our cells to shrink, and sort of curl down on itself, until the cells can no longer replicate. "When people are under stress they look haggard, it's like they age before your eyes, and here's something going on at a molecular level" that reflects that impression, said one of the researchers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California at San Francisco.
So now, on top of all the stress related to having a president and vice president who scared us to death about terrorists to get re-elected, I have to be stressed about the fact that my holiday stress might cause me to turn into an old bat - instantly, just like it happened in Grimm's fairy tales, when a girl would be cursed and suddenly become a crone. Or just like this Christmas doll my sister brought home once that had an apple for a head; her face looked all juicy and white at the start of the week and then by the end of the week, it was all discolored and puckered.
I flipped through the hot new self-help book by Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist from Columbia, Md., "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now."
One of them is the cardinal rule of anxiety: Avoidance makes it worse; confrontation gradually improves it.
Yep. I definitely need to rip Frosty's face off.
Why am I not surprised?
Since this thread will no doubt get a lot of replies..for a much lighter side of Christmas , does anyone have a copy of the classic Russell Baker column on the Fruitcake? As I write this, I can't believe that the Times, who used to have Baker, now has Dowd and Krugman..
MoDo gives ME the mullygrubs all the time.
Perhaps she needs to reflect on the Nativity Creche?
I think this article was done tongue-in-cheek and she isn't serious.
Yep, Mo the crone just couldn't resist that dig.
Michael, you are so way better off now.
It is rather perverse to my mind, that the NYT would continue to exhibit this obviously emotionally disturbed woman. What are they waiting for her to do, put a bullet through her head. This women needs help, not exhibition.
I suppose for Liberals, misery loves company.
Happy Holidays Maureen.
My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house. There's a mouse Santa Claus and mouse Mrs. Claus and mice elves and a miniature Christmas village with mice, and some rat Cinderella coachmen in pink waistcoats and rats in red velvet vests and more rats, wearing frilly red-and-white nightshirts and nightcaps and holding little candles, leading you up the steps to bed.
Her whole family sounds kewl, what happened to her?
Among her problems is not knowing the difference between "being unhappy" and "being depressed." It would seem that a person who believes everything is about "me" is bound to be unhappy when more mature people are thinking of someone else or something else.
I can guess at something else she needs.....
This is an understandably unhappy woman.
Michael Douglas is not looking good.
Only a miserable, self-absorbed, Liberal (like her) could write such crap, and mean it.
heh heh heh
I don`t get too gung ho for holidays either but this article take with others by her reveal a demented,snotty little rich girl that is very shallow.
Getting ones way politically is a very small element of living and these libs who are catatonic over the rejection of their views are just laughable.
Yeah, about as tongue-in-cheek as her last piece of "journalism", in which she ranted against white males -- or the one before that, where she basically slandered her own brother, Kevin, for being a pro-Bush moron. (Actually, Kevin sounds like the only normal one in the Dowd clan.)
I don't fault dowdy ol' Maureen one bit. It's her doctors who are derelict of duty for not prescribing a strong anti-PMS pill. Can't they see the poor woman is suffering?!
Don't worry Moroon, Christmas hates you too.
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