Holding out for that Christmas Worm feeling.

Some people go bananas over Christmas. They decorate their houses, their cars, their workplaces. They listen to Christmas music and make Christmas themed treats. They have Christmas parties and wear ugly Christmas sweaters.

I like Christmas. I think it's a nice time of year (mainly because it coincides with breaks from school and work). I always look forward to spending time with my family, eating cookies, playing xbox, putting a tree up.  I also like many of the accoutrements of Christmas: the decorations and lights, the occasional snow. I live in Koreatown so I always look forward to the Tiger Lights going up, courtesy of the Koreatown B.I.A. Christmas is generally a time of year when people are feeling simultaneously stressed out to the max but also generous so it feels like people are less likely to push you out of their way or close a door in your face. Also, my oldest friend on the planet was born Christmas Day and I'm pretty sure that for the first few years of my conscious life I thought she was the reason we had Christmas at all.

So, I don't hate Christmas. I like it. That being said I also understand that many people do not like Christmas or don't celebrate the holiday for many different reasons. Even if you like Christmas it can still feel overwhelming and jarring at times, so I can imagine it must be hell on earth for people who don't celebrate Christmas or who don't like Christmas. As soon as the Halloween decorations come down the Christmas ones go up and we're all in for two months of non-stop cheery elves, drummer boys, and wrapping paper.  Christmastime (especially for the non-religious who are like "Jesus who?") is also unprecedented in its pressure to BUY ALL THE THINGS. Buy the things to show your family and friends you care, buy the things to show your partner how much you really love them, buy the things to make that person you like realize they like you too. If you don't buy all the things then noone will like you, everyone will think you're rude, and you are a cruel monster who doesn't understand the Spirit of Christmas. 

For all of these reasons when I read that Shoppers Drug Mart was going to hold off on the Christmas music for a few weeks I felt happy. Christmas music and decorations that pop up right after Halloween really bother me because it's like I just bought all the candy and the costumes and the decorations for spookytime, give me a break! It's hard to transition from blood and guts to baby jesus and peace on earth so a little time in between would be grand. Also, two months of Christmas music is too much, it's just too much. It seems that many people do not share my opinion. I decided to go over some of the comments on Shoppers' Facebook page (where they made their announcement) and I was shocked by the backlash (why would they announce it at all? Just don't play the music and noone will notice, right?).

Some commenters supported the decision, saying that it's respectful to wait until after Remembrance Day to "honour the vets" etc. Some people said "hurray, only one month of Christmas music, my ears thank you!" Some people were not so understanding. 

This person is angry because if Wal-Mart does it then everyone should. They think that the people who complained about the Christmas music should "remember" Christmas as a holiday with "good cheer, family time and warm memories." November is dreary enough, the music helps! This person clearly has no understanding of the fact that some people don't believe in Christmas but, also, that some people have bad memories of Christmas.

I was surprised at how many of the comments were angry because Christmas music is basically a natural phenomenon that God sent to earth to cheer us all up because we all LOVE Christmas. It doesn't seem to occur to some people that Christmas is not a thing for some people, or that some people may not have families, maybe they were abused at Christmas, maybe their parents died at Christmas. Christmas Cheer is not an innate human instinct, it's a learned thing and not everyone wants to experience it.  A lot of people threatened to take their business elsewhere: "I'm going to London Drugs!" "I'm going to Rexall!" It's like, really? Because you can't listen to music while you buy your tampons and toilet paper you're going to go buy them elsewhere? You need to hear Silent Night while you pick out the right suppository? It's a Drug Store, not a fancy Department store where you'll spend hours perusing. You go in, buy your conditioner and dental floss,and you get out.

Then of course we get into the racists. The racists who are like this is CANADA! Play our music! We are Canadians and Canadians love Christmas!! This person doesn't even have to elaborate when he bemoans the end of Canadian identity from his mobile device:

 

This next one I reported to Facebook for hate speech:

THAT race. That race insisting on praying to "Allah" but denying ALL christians the right to pray. That race is ruining Christmas and they're doing it because they are not Canadian. They are foreign and if they don't like Canada they can go back to the Pacific Ocean from whence they came. Like WTF. Really? First of all, race and religion are not the same thing. Second of all, you are a racist. A lot of religions don't celebrate Christmas. A lot of people who are religious don't celebrate Christmas. Blaming the decline of Christmas because of one "race's" insidious attack on Christianity is insane. Third of all, Madison Avenue is not in Canada so.. you know, your argument about this being Canada and all might not really work on that one.  This is insane, if this person exemplifies the Christmas spirit then the Christmas spirit is fuuucked up.

It's just truly bizarre to me that people will rant and rave about a few weeks of Christmas music. Who cares? Everywhere else is playing music, is it going to kill you to have one five minute reprieve from it a day? How often do these people go to Shoppers' anyways?

So people are nuts about Christmas. They will defend listening to Christmas music in every single store they shop in until they are blue in the face. People are racist. People are mean. People think that their customs should be everybody's customs. This last comment is my favorite: Christmas music gives us that worm feeling this time of the year and that worm feeling is really what Christmas is all about, right?

 

We should all take a cue from mystery Facebook commenter four, who in the midst of all this insanity took it upon herself to remind us all (from her mobile device) about what really matters, to remind us of the true symbol of peace on earth and the Christmas season: The Christmas Worm Feeling.

for geek christmas parties

it's christmas season and that means lots and lots of parties. the difference between christmas parties and regular all-year parties is food.

when you go to a christmas party you should usually bring food with you--as a gift for your host, but also just because it's christmas and people expect A LOT of tasty treats.

so you can just bring a brie wheel, or you can wow your geek friends with treats garnished with a super mario mushroom radish:





thanks internet!

does santa vote conservative??

my friend H posted this on facebook this morning, totally brilliant:

"First of all, let me make absolutely clear that this commentary in no way intends to use Santa Claus as a tool for political partisanship.

After all, poor Santa’s been through enough over the past hundred years. The Cold War was a particularly taxing time for him, as he got caught in the middle of the struggle for global domination between America and the Soviet Union. Contrary to popular belief, Santa Claus was never banned in the Soviet Union. Christmas trees were, but that was actually the doing of the Russian Orthodox Church, not the communists. The Church banned Christmas trees (most of which came from Germany) as a sort of economic sanction against Germany for going to war against Russia in World War I. Christmas trees were legalized in the mid-1930s when Stalin determined that the benefits to children outweighed the dangers of bourgeois culture. However, Santa’s fashion sense suffered somewhat when it was decreed that the Soviet Santa had to wear a blue coat in order to distinguish it from the American Santa’s red coat. In fact, the politically rehabilitated Santa (or Father Frost, as he was known in Russia) proved to be an ideal agent for political centralization: he was ordered to replace local ‘Santa-type’ characters in the other Soviet republics in order to ensure greater cultural unity. The positive side of this of course is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, most former republics kept the Russian Santa as well as revived their own local Santa’s, so now they have two Santa’s giving gifts instead of one (bonus!). All except Croatia, whose government launched a campaign to eradicate all vestiges of the former Soviet Santa when it won independence.

Post-cold war politics haven’t left him unscathed either. Denmark – which for years has hosted the annual Santa Claus World Congress (which awards Santa Of The Year, among other events such as the annual Santa Hula Hoop Contest, Santa Bike Parade, and Santa Beach Paddle) is now being challenged for North Pole primacy by upstart former Soviet republic Kyrgyzstan, which, although Muslim, has decided to implement a Santa Claus tourism development strategy involving naming a mountain ‘Mount Santa Claus’ and holding a rival World Santa Claus Congress. Mount Santa Claus, incidentally, joins other renowned Kyrgyzstani mountains such as Mount Lenin, Mount Communism, Mount Free and Independent Korea, Mount of the Military Topographers, and Mount of the 19th Party Congress.

Even the Canadian Santa wasn’t immune to the upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s. The Toronto Santa Claus parade had, for several decades, packed up and shipped itself to Montreal to participate in the Montreal Santa Claus parade, in a show of solidarity between the two cities. In 1969 however separatist FLQ terrorists designated the Toronto Santa Claus a primary target of Anglophone imperialism and threatened to bomb him, so the whole tradition was cancelled as a security measure.

But anyway, that’s all ancient history. Santa Claus is still thriving, at least as much as he can in the new globalized, neoliberal world economy. Which leads me to wonder...is he actually thriving? How has Santa Claus fared under the past couple of years of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government?

Well, for one thing, he probably doesn’t get your mail anymore. Under Harper’s Conservatives, dozens of rural and northern post offices have been closed, cutting off service to over 55,000 rural Canadians.

But maybe Santa was able to apply for stimulus funding, to build capital infrastructure projects like high-speed satellite reception at his workshop? Well, not likely. You see, Santa advocates for children and world peace, and those are three cardinal sins when it comes to seeking Conservative funding. His application would have been rejected either on the basis of his use of advocacy (which, as the Status of Women Canada discovered, is unacceptable) or support of world peace (which, as the KAIROS foundation recently discovered, is anti-semitic). His support of children probably doesn’t situate him well with the Conservatives either: almost 10% of Canadian children live in poverty, not including the over 25% of aboriginal and First Nations children, and the 37% of food bank users in Canada who are children under the age of 18 (food bank use, meanwhile, has jumped by 18% over the past year, so the number is probably even higher now). So while Santa’s priority is to help children, the Conservatives are pursuing a strategy of making things worse for children, so it’s unlikely funds will be forthcoming. Either way, the federal Conservatives haven’t even bothered to develop a national strategy on child poverty, so Santa, like the provinces, is alone on this one.

It’s also not entirely clear how Santa is going to deliver all his gifts. Used to be that he jumped down the chimney. Of course, given that the Canadian government eliminated funding for new public housing units in the 1990s, causing homelessness to grow at staggering rates (740% in Calgary during the past decade), and that the Conservatives’ housing initiative in this year’s federal budget – while a first – is geared primarily toward renovations instead of new housing, a lot of people don’t have chimneys for Santa to hop through any more.

And how exactly does Santa get by during his seasonal shutdown period? While opposition proposals to reduce the number of hours required for EI eligibility would have undoubtedly helped Santa during the off-season, and the recent move to extend parental benefits to the self-employed is a good step, it’s unlikely to benefit Santa since he’s a bit old for children. And given that one in five seniors in Canada is living in poverty, things don’t bode so well for him on that count either.

While the ongoing shortage in skilled trades has probably hit Santa’s workshop pretty hard, one would think Santa could take advantage of opportunities to hire sponsored immigrant workers at his workshop to keep up with growing demand. Oops, only the Conservatives’ failure to follow through on their THREE-YEAR OLD promise to create a national framework for recognition and assessment of foreign credentials, coupled with the new watered-down version of a framework that won’t be fully active for FOUR MORE YEARS, probably hasn’t helped much on that front. Nor has the fact that the Conservatives somehow forgot to spend a third of the money they ‘allocated’ for immigrant language instruction programs in this year’s budget.

So all in all, life under Harper’s Conservatives hasn’t been too pleasant for poor old Santa. Nor for the reindeer either: the Conservatives’ consistent policy of refusing to sign international treaties for good things (like fighting climate change, or the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People) meant they also refused to sign the Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare. I don’t think it’s so much that the Conservatives hate reindeer as it is that they hate international treaties. Which raises another concern: does the Conservative government’s growing determination to assert military force in the Arctic mean Santa is going to get the boot? Or worse yet, get bombed by Canadian submarines? Of course, given the Canadian government’s penchant for purchasing cheap used and malfunctioning military equipment, it’s probably not something he’ll have to worry about for a while.

And in case this has gotten you worried about poor old Santa, I wouldn’t be too concerned, at least as long as the Conservatives are in office. Their failure to introduce any meaningful pension reform to help the significant percentage of Canadians who are unable to save for retirement, means that Santa won’t be able to afford retirement for the foreseeable future.

So rest assured he’ll probably pay you a visit this year. Meanwhile sit back and enjoy this brilliant animation of what happens when you privatize Santa (as the Conservatives no doubt will try):"