{"id":1225,"date":"2007-12-18T17:08:10","date_gmt":"2007-12-18T17:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1225"},"modified":"2007-12-18T17:08:10","modified_gmt":"2007-12-18T17:08:10","slug":"christmas_meme_part_2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/12\/18\/christmas_meme_part_2\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Meme, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Huh… it would seem that when I did that Christmas meme<\/a> a few days ago, I somehow failed to copy over a number of the questions from SamuraiFrog’s blog<\/a>, and then I failed to notice the omission. I just now saw that Jaquandor<\/a> has also snagged the meme from SF, only his version is obviously much longer. So, obsessive-compulsive sort that I am and in the interest of completeness, here is the rest of the Christmas meme, presented for your edification and\/or amusement, assuming you can find any of either in these silly things:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Hardest person to buy for:<\/b> My dad, without question. This is a man who doesn’t like anything<\/i>. He doesn’t read, so books are out. He doesn’t like movies or music, so shiny silver discs are pointless. He doesn’t care about clothes, and in fact actively detests any of the usual sorts of nice clothing items that people frequently give as gifts (notably sweaters and ties — all he wears are jeans, pocket-Ts, and the occasional aloha shirt, of which he has about 20). He doesn’t like the sorts of little knick-knacks and doo-dads that many people collect. About all that really seems to fire him up are tools<\/i> — he just loves getting some kind of specialized handtool designed to pry off the access plate over the tralfaz gear on a 1950 Buick Roadmaster (only the 1950 though, because they changed the design for ’51!). The problem is that when he realizes he needs one of these things, he runs out and buys it for himself. Honestly, I’m so gunshy about him hating every gift I ever give him that it’s very hard for me to even work up the enthusiasm to buy him anything…<\/li>\n
  2. Easiest person to buy for:<\/b> Probably my mom, the exact polar opposite of Dad when it comes to gifts. A DVD, a CD, a pair of ear-rings, a nifty little tchotchke for her curio cabinet… she likes it all.
    \n(For the record, The Girlfriend probably falls somewhere in between these two. I generally know what she likes and\/or needs, but I worry incessantly about whether she’s going to like whatever I choose for her…)<\/li>\n
  3. Worst Christmas gift you ever received:<\/b> A friend of mine back in the third or fourth grade gave me a pair of tube socks. Practical and inexpensive (looking back, that was probably a big factor behind this choice; I don’t think the kid’s parents had a lot of money to spare on their son’s classmates), but at that age, not exactly number-one on the wish list. A stack of used comics would’ve been much cooler…<\/li>\n
  4. When do you start shopping for Christmas:<\/b> I usually start thinking about what I could get for various people about midway through October, and very occasionally I’ll pick something up around that time if I happen to run across a good deal, but for the most part I wait until after Thanksgiving. I have a real problem with the way the boundaries between our various holiday seasons have blurred because of the needs of the retail industry, and it really galls me that we no longer have clearly delineated times for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.<\/li>\n
  5. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present:<\/b> No. That seems really wrong to me, somehow. Much better to take an item back to the store and exchange it if you don’t like it, then to pawn it off on somebody else.<\/li>\n
  6. Travel at Christmas or stay home:<\/b> I’ve always stayed home just because of circumstance and habit, but I would like to go to New York City during the Christmas season sometime, and also to Germany to check out the Christmas markets<\/a> I’ve heard so much about.<\/li>\n
  7. Can you name all of Santa\u2019s reindeer:<\/b> Um, no. And anyone who can scares me deeply.<\/li>\n
  8. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning:<\/b> Presents from The Girlfriend on Christmas Eve (usually — this year is going to be a break from our pattern, but that’s ok). Presents from the family, Christmas morning. Why? I don’t know, that’s just The Way It’s Always Been Done.<\/li>\n
  9. Most annoying thing about this time of year:<\/b> Wow, there are so many things… the commercialization, the Bill O’Reilly acolytes who get all militant and bitchy if somebody doesn’t issue the proper holiday greeting, the crowds and traffic and cold weather… it all sucks hard. But I think what really gets to me more than anything is the music. The incessant, inescapable, systematic force-feeding of that synthetically cheerful, syrupy-sweet canon of the same 50 damn songs. Oh, yes, there are a lot of different versions<\/i> of the holiday canon recorded by every artist you can think of from Sinatra to Twisted Sister (I’m not kidding about that one; check out A Twisted Christmas<\/a>), but really you’ve got a very small selection of all the same old songs that everybody has been robotically carolling for the last 80 years, and it plays every place you turn<\/i> for about six weeks straight. The “all-holiday hits” format used to turn up on the radio sometime during Thanksgiving Day weekend, but like the decorations that start appearing in Target and Costco in late summer, the music start-up seems to have been creeping into the light earlier and earlier each year. It starts in mid-November now. How long until it begins on All Saints’ Day (the day after Halloween)? And it’s not just the radio, which we can always turn off when we get sick of it… it’s in the stores, too! And oftentimes the mall PA will be playing different Christmas songs than the individual store PAs, so if you stand in just the right spot, you get a cacophonous mixture of two or more of those hateful earworms. And then you get the people on the train humming or even (god forbid!) singing<\/i> the stuff! Arg! I truly think there is too much<\/i> music in our society these days, blasting at you from all manner of sources in every environment and setting regardless of whether it’s appropriate or wanted — a little silence would be nice once in awhile — but it’s particularly egregious around this time of the year. If I had my way, the Christmas music would be strictly limited: only between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, and only one song every 30 minutes, slipped into a rotation of non-holiday music. Anybody with me on that?<\/li>\n
  10. What I love most about Christmas:<\/b> This is going to sound terrible, but honestly? When it’s over. There is so much stress and unrealistic expectation built into the holidays these days, that it’s really hard to find anything resembling the joy that the songs and movies and television specials keep telling us we’re supposed to be feeling. Perhaps it’s not the times so much as the fact that I’m grown up now, and maybe it’s because I don’t have any kids around to help me get vicariously excited about it all, but for me Christmas is, in a lot of very real ways, a total drag.
    \nOne of my favorite holiday movies is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation<\/i>. In the final scene in that film, Clark Griswald finds himself standing alone on the front porch; all the chaos has died down and he is finally able to say, with a real tone of satisfaction and contentment, “I did it.” That’s<\/i> the feeling that I strive for around this time of year. That one brief moment when you know that you’ve survived another year, that you’ve managed to get your family and friends at least one gift that they kinda-sorta like, and now you’re able to just exhale and let go of all the pressure to be so damn happy<\/i>.<\/p>\n

    Can you tell the season is wearing on me a bit this afternoon?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Huh… it would seem that when I did that Christmas meme a few days ago, I somehow failed to copy over a number of the questions from SamuraiFrog’s blog, and then I failed to notice the omission. I just now saw that Jaquandor has also snagged the meme from SF, only his version is obviously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memes-and-quizzes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}