This is the moment the fear and loathing sets in. You realize the entire apparatus of cheer is a fragile house of cards. Without the dinosaur, Christmas is ruined. Without the ham, the family will fracture. Without the right lighting for the TikTok video, the memory is invalid. We had turned the celebration of incarnation and goodwill into a logistics nightmare, and the real horror was that we all knew it. We were Sisyphus, but the boulder was a spiral-cut honey-baked ham and the hill was an icy driveway.
My own gonzo Christmas began, as all bad ideas do, with a promise to keep things “low-key.” Low-key, in the post-2020 lexicon, is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid admitting we’ve forgotten how to be joyful. By December 23rd, I was standing in a parking lot at 9 PM, the icy rain turning the asphalt into a mirror of my own haggard face. I was looking for a specific toy—a fluorescent, screaming dinosaur that my nephew would likely forget by New Year’s Eve. The store was out. The clerk, a teenager with the dead eyes of a combat medic, shrugged. “Amazon says Tuesday,” he mumbled. gonzo xmas 2022
Tuesday. Christmas was Sunday.