I'm so glad the media is looking out for those of us poor, wretched creatures spending a whole day all by ourselves.  They've enlisted their usual legion of pop-psychologists and "cultural anthropologists" to remind us of how miserable we're supposed to be, and what we need to do to not be such complete and utter losers.  (How about a one-way ticket to the Land of Misfit Toys?)

But, honestly.  Must all roads in life lead to a potential meltdown? 

I've been fending off invitations for a couple of weeks now from well-meaning friends, whose attentions have put me in what they insist is a defensive stance.  "No one should be alone on Christmas," one of them said at dinner tonight, after I politely declined his kind invite to a Christmas meal with his family.

It's not enough to say, "that's very kind, but no thanks."  You have to answer them why not.  "You have other plans, then?"  No, just chillin', like Bob Dylan. 

See, it's hard to convince people that spending Christmas day alone listening to The Feeling and Donavon Frankenreiter, reading a little Kierkegaard, maybe downloading some porn, and tending to the houseplants, is not a poor substitute for human contact—it's more or less the ideal late-December day. I mean, the roommate's gone. There's no place I've got to be, no immediate obligations to fulfill. Why would I want to spoil this golden opportunity for a little R&R?

And when you think about it, you know the fun part of Christmas is over in, like, half an hour, and then the mind-numbing boredom sets in, and by two in the afternoon you're looking to see what's playing at the movies.  (May I suggest Black Christmas?)

Christmas is indisputably our most sentimental holiday. And I mean that in the sense of "effusively or insincerely emotional": mawkish, mushy, maudlin. Which is well and good, but don't expect me to wear my sad clown face around all day just because you're playing the happy clown (and not too convincingly, for the most part).  I'll show my affection for friends and family in my own everyday way any day of the year.

We keep hearing that Christmas is supposed to be something that is utterly at odds with the way we approach it, while at the same time we are incessantly encouraged to approach it in a way that's utterly at odds with what it's supposed to be. Built up relentlessly over the course of a month and a half—coming on two months these days—Christmas morning is not really a celebration of mother and child, of the endurance of familial bonds, of the birth of hope into a world of strife; it's a child's introduction to the culture of the money shot.  Like that Gawd-awful BMW commercial with that horrible screaming kid, that should be an ad for Ritalin.

I see something like that, and frankly, I can't think of anything at all I'd rather do than spend the day quietly, blissfully alone.