Ah, the holidays: children, their faces alight with joy, joining their parents in celebrating a season of peace, stores and our televisions pealing carols of joy and hymns of peace, and bell-ringers on every corner, ringing out melodies of…wait for it, wait for it…a little more…it's almost here…joy and peace. In this season of, yes, joy and peace spreading throughout the world like a virulent fungal plague it is good to remember that some of us, most notably me, hate joy and peace and wish you would all just shut the fuck up about it. I suspect that many of you secretly agree with me, because of how the suicide rate spikes around the holidays. Of course, those people who have made the ultimate statement about how much they hate the holidays no longer agree with me, because of how they're dead. Who will speak for those who nobly expressed their disdain for and disgust with the happiest time of the year by offing themselves? Only I, and maybe that chick played on television's Ghost Whisperer by Jennifer Love Hewitt's dinners.

            Yes, Virginia: Jennifer Love Hewitt does have some mighty big dinners.

            Also, if Blow Reilly, Glenn Blech and His Lardship Limbaugh are right and there is a war on Christmas, I want to sign up. Seriously, I have my own flamethrower.

            Consider children, certainly among the least appealing of the many unappealing aspects of this season, and their theoretically alight-with-joy faces. Look around the next time you're passing a toy store (running past, in my case, eyes closed and fists aflail); that is not joy you see on their faces, bunkie; that's sheer unadulterated avarice, the kind of greed you're not likely to see on the face of any other creature who does not manufacture crystal meth, spend TARP funds on his executive suite or trade T-bill futures on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. If that child were larger and you got between him or her and whatever useless, annoying, degrading or just oddly disturbing piece of shit his/her little pals and the media have told her/him (yes, we're talking about a hermaphrodite child here) he/she just has! to! have! on this most joyous of holidays, he/she would fuck you up, my friend. (That's why I don't feel so guilty about trampling the little sociopaths.) (Although if trends in childhood obesity continue, the trampling will soon be on the other big fat foot.) The only people more miserable than these adorable little crotchfruit are their parents, for whom the perfect gift might be this little beauty. (A sniper air-rifle: when Ralphie grows up, he's not going to shoot his eye out; he's going to shoot someone else's eye out.) Run, little Mary, Joey and/or Sarah! Daddy's got a gun! "Oh, it's not a real gun, officer; it's a BB gun; I was just funning the little'uns. Little Oxycontin! Stop playing with your eyepatch! That scab where your eyeball used to be ain't ever going to heal if you keep pickin' at it!" That look of abject terror on a child's face, or where his face used to be: that's the real meaning of Xmas right there.

            Also, if your kids are anything like mine--and I thank god every moment of every day that they're not--they will have forgotten whatever you gave them in like 15 minutes--forgotten it as thoroughly as if they had gone back in time and killed its grandfather--and will be playing with the boxes that shit came in out in the back yard the rest of the day. Whee! Expensive-toy boxes are so much more fun than Alpo boxes from the supermarket!

            It has not escaped my attention that some people claim to enjoy holiday music, and I suppose it's possible; somebody, probably the very same somebodies, buys Celine Dion CDs and goes to Mariah Carey concerts. (And for the sake of fairness, please allow me to opine: Mariah Carey too has some mighty impressive dinners.) (Hey, Virginia? It's way past your fucking bedtime. Please leave Daddy alone with his "medicine.") You know something? There are also people who insert needles into their clitorises and/or penises for fun (probably that annoying hermaphrodite kid again when he/she grows up), but that doesn't mean every fucking store and television commercial has to play back for us what it sounds like when someone does so. (In case you're curious, it sounds a lot like, "AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH, I'VE INSERTED NEEDLES IN MY PENIS AND/OR CLITORIS, AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!") Now, I enjoy saccharine virtually melody-less music as much as the next guy likes being disemboweled and his entrails fed to wolverines, but could we limit the playing of this music to, say, places where I might never be? Wal-Mart, for example. Seriously, Wal-Mart, play the fuck out of "The Little Drummer Boy." Play it every fucking second your doors are open, and implant chips in your customers' heads (not that most of them don't already have them, generally placed there by Fox News or the RNC--how else to explain Sarah Palin?) that keep playing it while they sleep, shit, multiply like fruit flies and buy guns to blow the fuck out of one another. But keep that shit out of my local wine emporium, or I might not be responsible for my actions. Well, not that I'm all that responsible for my actions at the best of times, but I could get way less so, especially with all the firepower available to me at Wal-Mart; where do you think I got the flamethrower? I am, as always, just sayin'.

            (I know: I just claimed never to have been in Wal-Mart and that I purchase my weaponry there. Silly readers: that's what the Interwebs are for: never having to go into a Wal-Mart. And of course, now and forever, for porn.)

            (Oh, and speaking of "The Little Drummer Boy," did two people ever look less comfortable in one another's presence than Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing that song together on some long-ago television special? Exactly how many 'ludes did Bowie drop to achieve that perfectly-glazed demeanor? And what military-grade CIA hallucinogens were the writers and producers on when they thought of pairing those two artists in a duet? I cannot imagine that anyone before or since ever thought, "Hey, you know who'd do an awesome duet of a Christmas song together? That 'White Christmas' guy and Ziggy Stardust!")

            Another holiday thing that just affects me like chewing aluminum foil (which I do on a regular basis, because it makes me look tough): bells. Fucking bells. I totally get Poe's annoyance with the "tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells." Why bells at Christmastime? Did Jesus play the bells? I think not. If Jesus had played the bells, he would not have gotten a following of (mostly) loyal apostles (12 out of 13 ain't bad); he would have gotten regularly and brutally thrown in the Sea of Galilee. Although I suppose it is possible that the Romans crucified him precisely because he played the bells. "Hey, who should we crucify for the holidays?" they might have asked one another, only in Latin, because of how pretentious they were. "Dude, how about that bell-ringing guy?" (Dude, from the Latin dudus, meaning "dude.") "Yeah!" Thus was a tradition born, one that 2000 years later led to my severely wounding a Salvation Army guy, then throwing his ass in Lake Michigan.

            So this year I shall celebrate Christmas as I do every year: alone, drunk and masturbating, probably while looking at pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt's dinners. (Or possibly Mariah Carey's. This Xmas, like all Xmases, I shall thank god for the Interwebs, which has, I reiterate with true joy, given us the gift of cheap and abundant porn.) Should good fortune come my way and the sidewalk outside my condo be blessed with carolers, I will welcome them as they were welcomed in the middle ages, by pouring a cauldron of boiling oil down on them. (Oh, how their screams of agony make me chuckle. I guess I'm just a sentimental fool after all.) And should anyone wish to join me in a suicide pact, I am agreeable. You go first.