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.
She's trying to convince herself she gave Michael something that he needs while he's living with Catherine.
She's having a major meltown; first she trashed her family about the election and now she mocks them because THEY have Christmas traditions?
Given Mrs. Dowd's obviously cheerful rendition of Christmas spirit (cough, cough), let us sing an appropriate holiday melody in honor of her work.
You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch.
You really are a heel.
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel.
Mr. Grinch.
You're a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.
You're a monster, Mr. Grinch.
Your heart's an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You've got garlic in your soul.
Mr. Grinch.
I wouldn't touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.
You're a vile one, Mr. Grinch.
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile.
Mr. Grinch.
Given the choice between the two of you
I'd take the seasick crockodile.
You're a foul one, Mr. Grinch.
You're a nasty, wasty skunk.
Your heart is full of unwashed socks
Your soul is full of gunk.
Mr. Grinch.
The three words that best describe you,
are, and I quote: "Stink. Stank. Stunk."
You're a rotter, Mr. Grinch.
You're the king of sinful sots.
Your heart's a dead tomato splot
With moldy purple spots,
Mr. Grinch.
Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.
You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch.
With a nauseaus super-naus.
You're a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Mr. Grinch.
You're a three decker saurkraut and toadstool sandwich
With arsenic sauce.
Excerpt:
""Thirty-four years ago, I inherited the family fruitcake. Fruitcake is the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom. It had been in my grandmother's possession since 1880, and she passed it to a niece in 1933. Surprisingly, the niece, who had always seemed to detest me, left it to me in her will....I would have renounced my inheritance except for the sentiment of the thing, for the family fruitcake was the symbol of our family's roots. When my grandmother inherited it, it was already 86 years old, having been baked by her great-grandfather in 1794 as a Christmas gift for President George Washington. Washington, with his high-flown view of ethical standards for Government workers, sent it back with thanks, explaining that he thought it unseemly for Presidents to accept gifts weighing more than 80 pounds, even though they were only eight inches in diameter...There is no doubt...about the fruitcake's great age. Sawing into it six Christmasses ago, I came across a fragment of a 1794 newspaper with an account of the lynching of a real-estate speculator in New York City."
---"Fruitcake is Forever," Russell Baker, New York Times, December 25, 1983, Section 6 (p. 10)
[NOTE: your librarian can help you find the complete article]
Maureen, that's mother-speak for "My! But, you've grown into crazy little psycho-bitch."
Bless you....may I suggest, since you dug it up..that you post it as a seprate thread...and put it in Announcements..It is a holiday classic..and everyone should get a chance to see it...IMHO, it's one of the funniest things ever written..
She definitely does have issues, and what's more seems to be the black sheep of a fairly normal and warm family. She seems to be trapped in her self-identification as an intellectual light. If only she knew how she is perceived by the 80% who reside outside her liberal cult's protective NYT bubble.
Mo, take it from me, the bitterness is not worth its price. Repent. Bottom line - you need Jesus, honey.
Southern logic... "When somebody seems intent on driving over the edge, go ahead and let them. Either they'll learn the hard way or you'll get their bass boat."
Maureen dear, maybe the guys wearing your expensive gifts are with other women because you are already a crone.
Maureen Dowd has the Holiday Blues. We need to cheer her up by sending her lots of Christmas (not Holiday) Cards.
"Her whole family sounds kewl, what happened to her?"
God has a way of putting people in their own private hell. Some call it poetic justice.
JH
I've never bothered reading *any* of her articles before this one. She's a section 8. Bitter and nasty.
Actually, her brother kevin is more like the rest of the family. She's the weird one.
Her whole family is conservative, and hard to the right. She's abnormal. At least one of her relatives even worked for the Bush campaign.
LOL. Didn't want to offend her. She is miseable enough that it is. I didn't want to be the one to push her over the edge. :)
Merry Chrismas and a Happy New Year. May the good Lord continue to bless our great country.
"I have to be stressed about the fact that my holiday stress might cause me to turn into an old bat
Don't look now MoDo, but......
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I thought the samething.
Nope, she's serious. Her articles around the holidays go into a weird depressive state (though probably more so this year).
She's not joking, she really doesn't like christman (or easter) or most holidays.
Regardless of what she says, I think its because she hates being around her family. They're all conservatives, and probably taunt her.
May I suggest a few solutions to your dilemma?
Strychnine.
Arsenic.
Carbon monoxide.
Why do wonderful, useful, loving people like my wife die at age 51 while this miserable, bitter old harridan gets paid to spread her poisonous,hateful bile all around the country?
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