Holiday Post-Mortem

Well, the Holidays are good and dead.  Christmas trees are piling up in the streets, tossed to the gutter by their ungrateful hosts like the bodies of plague victims in earlier times.  True, you still see the occasional tree illuminated in a window at night, plugged in by people desperate to squeeze every last Yule out of a dead log.  But nobody plays Christmas songs on the radio anymore.  And all the kids' presents are either broken or forgotten.  We haven't experienced an attack of the Christmas Spirit for ages, but it's still sad to watch the holly jolly time of year get dismantled, one decoration at a time, as if nothing ever happened.  The people we like are the ones who leave the colored Christmas lights on their house lit up until March.  Or the plastic Santa and reindeer sitting on the front lawn until July.  True, they tend to be either pathologically lazy or terminally drunk, but say what you will, they are the True Faithful. 

                                    "Hey buddy, could you spare a dime?"

Comments

[Martijn]

Super post. "And all the kids' presents are either broken or forgotten" but one of the jewels in the crown.

It's nice, getting the Christmas Spirit: makes the contrasting New Year's Cynicism so much fiercer!

[UF MIKE]

Thanks Martijn. Maybe one of these years I'll get the Christmas spirit again. I miss it so!

[Bullethole]

Here in Texas a lot of people have taken to putting out inflatable decorations. Santa, and a sled, and reindeer and elves, made like big ballons with lights in them flying across the front yards, and an extension cord triling into the garage that supplies electricity to a pump that presumably keeps air going into the inflatable and lights the lights inside Santa and his compadres.
the thing is, these things must be on a timer, because the festive scene you passed by the night before, the next morning looks like a crime scene. Santa, his reindeer and elves, and the big green letters that spell out HO-HO-HO are laying slaughtered on the lawn, airless and deflated like characters outr of Flatland. They are dead and cold and covered with Jack Frost, and its really nothing you want to see first thing in the morning.

[UF MIKE]

That's a chilling picture you pain, Bulletholes. I mean, I have an inflatable Santa too, but I keep it inside, and only use it for sexual purposes.

[Martijn]

Inflatable Christmas decoration... oof!

[But I have seen everything. Love the story though, Steve. And the UF burlesque comeback too! If only we bunch of loonies could form a commune... imagine.]