Growing up in Southern California, the xmas holidays were always a pretty depressing time for me because we never got any snow and we never got to have a ‘white Christmas.’ December in Riverside isn’t that much different from June; the weather was pretty much the same ole thing all year long; year after year…

I never actually got to see snow falling from the sky until I was in my thirties, when my wife and I moved to New Mexico!

People who grew up shoveling snow every winter may not agree with me, but I friggin’ LOVE the cold weather, and I LOVE snow – mostly because I was deprived of it for most of my life; but also I think maybe the fact that I was born in the middle of January in Chicago during a blizzard had something to do with it. Winter is my favorite season for sure…it’s in my DNA.

I spent the first two years of my life in Chi Town, but I remember virtually nothing because I was just a toddler. All of my childhood memories of xmas involve the sunny, smoggy skies of SoCal, with temps in the 70s. We hardly even got rain.

People have this romantic image of life in SoCal. It’s like: “Hey, it’s Christmas Eve and I’m sitting by the swimming pool, sipping martinis! Bet you wish you were here, huh? Huh huh!” Ugh.

Folks who live in less temperate climates may think that sounds pretty cool, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: it gets FUCKING BORING after a while.

It’s better to have seasons if you ask me.

There was snow in the San Bernardino mountains but my family didn’t ski, and they weren’t exactly into winter sports. Football and Basketball were the only sports my dad Roscoe cared about, and the only time I ever went ‘to the mountains’ was if a friend invited me along.

I was deprived of any sort of seasonal change growing up in the middle of the friggin desert, and so I never got to have a ‘white xmas.’  It was a foreign concept to me.

I’m still kinda bitter about it. Can you tell?

Xmas tree

We never had a real xmas tree growing up in Riverside because my parents always told me that my allergies wouldn’t allow for it. How’s that for guilt? But really, I didn’t mind having a fake tree. The idea of cutting down a beautiful living tree and then watching it slowly die in your living room for 3 weeks always seemed like such a terrible waste; tradition or no tradition.

But besides the fact that we only ever had one season in the ‘Inland Empire’ there was another depressing element to the xmas holiday in SoCal. When the holidays were over, people could just dump their used trees in the gutter, and eventually the city would come by and pick it up. This was before the days of recycling. Sometimes they would sit out there for weeks; after a while the old dead trees began to resemble giant brown tumbleweeds…

It was such a sad sight to see what was left of these beautiful evergreens; trees which had brought so much supposed joy to those families over the Holidays…to see them just rotting in the street like that when they were no longer needed…it was just another symbol of xmas hypocrisy, I suppose. That kinda summed up the shallow, throwaway consumer culture I saw all around me. I still don’t understand why it’s necessary to chop down swathes of forest for such selfish purposes…but there you go. Maybe I just don’t have the “Christmas spirit.” Whatever.

No, I much preferred our fake tree when I was a kid. As long as it looked real there was no problem, and we had this gigantic 6 foot tree that my dad Roscoe would dig out of the garage every year. He would spend hours assembling that thing and stringing up the lights, and we would cover it with so many decorations nobody could tell it wasn’t the real thing…especially with all the Angel Hair!

Angel hair

For some reason, my dad Roscoe had a real thing for that stuff they used to call ‘Angel Hair,’ which was basically spun fiberglass straight out of Dupont Labs. It was taken off the market years ago because it’s a super-carcinogen. Angel Hair sort of gave the appearance of snow, but Roscoe fucking covered the tree in that shit. He just slathered it all over every inch of that thing.

I don’t know if it was a New Orleans thing (where he was from), or what his fascination was with it, but he fucking loved it. The problem with Angel Hair was that if you touched it, the fibers would get underneath your skin and you would spend all night and the next day scratching. It felt like tiny needles poking you from under your skin but you could never get to it. You could scratch and scratch and it just wouldn’t go away for days. It was incredibly frustrating – and painful.

So we’d have a gigantic toxic xmas tree in the middle of the living room that we couldn’t touch for fear of getting Angel Hair under our skin!

Santa Claus

I can never remember a time when I believed in Santa Claus – not even as a kid – so I never had to deal with the trauma of finding out that Santa isn’t real. Thank goddess my parents were intelligent and considerate, and they trusted us enough to tell us the truth about Santa very early on.

Apparently it nearly destroyed Roscoe when he discovered his parents had been lying to him all along, and so he dispensed with the Santa charade when it came to raising his own kids. I’m thankful I lived in a fact-based home. I seem to recall it was explained to me that Santa Claus was sort of like Jesus; they were both silly myths that the vast majority of the other children believed in. It was understood – although never explicitly acknowledged – that I had to keep this “secret” to myself and not spoil it for the other kids.

I was smart enough to follow this advice. I didn’t want to ruin it for everyone. I wasn’t an asshole. I was a good kid. It was kind of cool having that secret knowledge which I could never share…except with my best friend Dan, who also happened to be Jewish…so he didn’t care.

But of course for some reason, people feel the need to lie to their kids about Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Stork; Jesus/Allah/Buddha/Jehovah/whatever.

I never understood why lying to children was such a capstone of parenting.

But there you go. I detest liars; especially parents who lie to their children. Maybe that’s why I don’t have kids.

Hanukkah vs. xmas.

Dan’s family was my second family growing up, so I spent a lot of time at the local Temple – Temple Beth El in Riverside – learning all about Hanukkah and the Festival of Lights and all that. In fact, whenever anyone found out I was a gentile I got to hear the story of Hanukkah…repeatedly. Jews love to tell that story, I tell you what. The elders always felt compelled to explain the ‘festival of lights’ to the little goyim.

It was a given that I was invited along to celebrate the holidays with Dan’s family (and there are a lot of Jewish holidays!) so I never complained.

Jewish cuisine is pretty bland for the most part…potato pancakes and Matzo ball soup…but man, they sure know how to do a brisket!! OH, THE BRISKET WAS TO DIE FOR!

And it was fun because I got to hear the Rabbi explain to me that “Jesus was a man…he was a good man, he was a great speaker…certainly, he had charisma…but he wasn’t our savior…” Not that I’d ever asked, but there you go. You hang around long enough with Jewish people during the holidays and you will hear that story, too.

Not that it mattered; it was just another silly ritual to me.

But it was also cool because all of the Jewish people I knew growing up were totally agnostic, and they admitted freely that they were mostly going through the motions to keep up their traditions. They were some of the most liberal, progressive people I ever met. They supported civil rights, human rights, and equality for everyone. Where the hell all these Zionist Chabad monsters like Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller came from, I don’t know…

Christian hypocrisy

For eleven months out of the year, all those fine Jesus-loving Christian folk are like: “I don’t want my tax dollars going to support people who refuse to work. Welfare is just plain wrong. I’m tired of my hard-earned tax money going to support all those lazy deadbeats…yadda yadda ya.” Or, “Why should I have to pay to help people who refuse to help themselves?…blah, blah, blah…”

And then suddenly at xmas time it’s all, “Peace on earth and goodwill toward men! I love Jesus! Help the poor…feed the sick..! Blah blah blah…”

What bullshit. If you’re only capable of caring for your fellow man for ONE MONTH out of the year, you can GO FUCK YOURSELF. All that fake ‘seasonal’ goodwill is so obviously insincere. Yuck.

Because it’s all fake, anyway. In reality, most Umerkins hate their fellow citizens. They consider anything that might benefit anyone other than themselves personally to be some sort of communist plot.

Like all those ‘pro-life’ fuckers that supposedly care so much about the sanctity of life who want to blow up clinics…with people still inside. They also fucking LOVE WAR and they are always foaming at the mouth to go nuke Iran or whoever. The fucking evangelicals  are actively working to bring about Armageddon.

They have no moral dilemma about blowing up hospitals, schools or UN Safe-havens in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or Gaza or Iran…or anywhere in the world.

Here at home, they don’t bat an eye at hundreds of immigrant children forever separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. No matter, they’ll probably end up in the hands of child sex-traffickers, anyway, so at least the GOP will be happy…

They sure don’t have a problem with 30 million American children going hungry every year, either, for that matter. What fine Christians!

But look: I am more than happy to share whatever I can all year round – especially if it will help benefit EVERYONE. I don’t need a special fucking time of year to be nice to people. The easiest way to fix all these problems is through a fair and equitable tax structure. I’d rather help the less fortunate than keep funding the war machine.

I’ve been a socialist since the 7^th grade. As such, I have absolutely NO PROBLEM paying my fair share of taxes, especially if it will help the greater good. Too bad all those ‘good Christians’ hate paying their taxes so much. What about “render unto Cesar” and all that bullshit?

Even Jesus said to pay your goddam taxes, asshats!

Fucking hypocrites.

Maybe they’ll start changing their tune after few more visits to the local food pantry…

Xmas movies

I swear to god I’ve never seen White Christmas or It’s A Wonderful Life. Never seen Miracle on 34^th St. or any of those crappy black & white holiday movies, for that matter. First of all, I could never relate to a ‘white xmas’ since we never got any fucking snow in SoCal; and secondly, those movies were way too WHITE for me! Nary a minority in sight!

Nope, no thanks to that reality. It makes me very uncomfortable.

Okay, so I realize those movies were made back in the 40s and 50s and that’s what life was like back then…but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I saw Santa Claus Conquers The Martians…that was bad enough.

Xmas music

I hate xmas music. Maybe it’s all the religious bullshit…all that ‘king’ this and ‘king’ that…Maybe it’s all the White folks who sing xmas carols, I dunno. And again with all the ‘White Christmas’ and the ‘Dashing through the Snow…’ [see above]. Most Christmas music is pure tripe – especially that fucking Mariah Carey song! Except for maybe The Peanuts theme by Vince Guaraldi. That fucking rocks.

Jesus myth

Both my parents were stone cold atheists. We never went to church, and from a very early age I understood that all of the world’s religions are simply the product of deluded, ignorant, MEN with severe control issues.

And certainly, no one in their right mind can deny that religious strife is responsible for most of the pain and misery in the world. People have been killing each other in the name of god since the beginning of time.

My dad was vehemently anti-religion, even though he’d been raised hardcore Catholic his entire life. He even attended Xavier University in New Orleans – a major Jesuit college. Somewhere along the way, something happened to turn him off religion forever. I think it was a culmination of things…mostly the hypocrisy.

But my dad’s cynicism about religion certainly rubbed off on me. It was easy enough to discern – even as a child – that man-made religions were not just totally irrelevant to our daily lives, they were above all just plain stupid: the pointless rituals; the funny costumes; the rules and regulations; the fasting and all the goddam praying to invisible whatever. Even as a child I could see how illogical and fantastic the whole Judeo-Christian concept was.

It’s hard to believe ADULTS still believe that shit, frankly, but there you go.

Unbiased analysis indicates that Christianity is a synthesis of Egyptian, Talmudic and Greek mythologies – which were combined in an ingenious way by Josephus, at the behest of the Flavians. The uncanny parallels between the myriad ancient birth-death-resurrection legends and the supposed life of Jesus cannot be easily dismissed. Nor can the parallels between The New Testament and Titus Flavius’s escapades in Wars with the Jews be easily explained.

I think the reason why Christians prefer ‘little baby Jesus’ at xmas time is because little baby Jesus – asleep in the manger – well…he can’t talk. He can’t preach any of that peace or love or goodwill toward men bullshit. All he can do is lie there in swaddling clothes and look beatific.

So xmas in my family had nothing to do with celebrating a mythological event. It was just a sort of “gift-giving” day. We went through the motions of the holiday without all the religious connotations. My brothers and I got up early to open gifts and then we’d play games all morning. Mom and dad would get up and cook. I liked the idea of not having to spend half the day in church, too.

Dad would sit in his easy chair and watch sports all afternoon on the big-screen TV. Dan would come over and we’d play in the backyard and swim for the rest of the day.

Not necessarily spiritual, but certainly no less magical.

A typical SoCal xmas.

No church was necessary.