Humbuggery

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Who wouldn’t want to celebrate the birth of the son of God? The little critter was just cuter than a bug’s ear, all swaddled up in his manger of hay and whatnot! So onward, Christian soldier, in the name of your omnipotent and ever-loving goo-goo baby lord—go buy a lot of stuff that nobody needs!

As in the past 20 years without fail, I will be doing my part in celebrating Baby Jesus’s birthday by travelling back to suburban Ontario to hang out with newly conceived rugrats and assorted elderly people making surprise visits to the house I spent my youth in, dispensing pocket change and hardened candies of 1970s vintage. FYI (love that abbreviation!), for the hip-replacement generation out there: if your nephew is old enough to have male pattern baldness, chances are he’s going to have a hard time plastering on a plastic smile when you reach into pocket and hand him two quarters wrapped in pocket lint. Just putting it out there.

The funny thing is, though, the dynamic between my newborn nieces and nephews and my octogenarian parents and their host of senile sidekicks seems to be narrowing every year. Sometimes it’s hard to even tell their faces apart, what with all of the drool and missing teeth and such. Both just stare blankly at any word I can utter, and both possess a strange “Spidey sense,” detecting even the slightest draft entering their stuffy and overheated environs. Weirdsville!

Now, I love my parents to death, and will even smile and nod through uncles and aunts offering up their dissertations on the new “coloured” president, but for the love of the suffering Jesus, can these holidays be more taxing? I don’t want to Grinch out your annual consumer fest here, but in the name of Allah, would it kill the television networks to put on something that isn’t fluffy claptrap aimed at the underdeveloped minds of children and shut-ins? During this trying time, I need all I can get to drown out the constant stream of names of everybody I ever shovelled driveways for who are now dying or dead of cancer. If Baby Jesus were any kind of a miracle worker, certainly creative television programming would be job number one, wouldn’t it? Sure, he could walk on water, change water into wine, blah blah blah, but he can’t make them stop playing the Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye Christmas episode? I guess Jesus slacks a bit on his birthday week, as the only channel the rabbit ears catch at my parents’ house is the reality show Cancer, Cancer, Cancer. No wonder visions of giant pulsing tumours replace the sugarplum fairies dancing in my head when I squeeze in at my parents’ dime-sized dinner table. Dear Mom: I love you, but please do the math before you launch into sentences like, “Mr. Johnson’s testicular tumour is spreading to his eyeball—who wants plum pudding?”

If you are one of the lucky ones who won’t have to keep slapping yourself awake in the Dante’s Inferno known as your parents’ house for over a week, then you are not to miss the ultimate roasting of chestnuts happening at Foufounes Électriques on Monday, Dec. 22, with one of the best fucking punk rock bands in the city, Vulgar Deli. The delightful soirée is aptly entitled Fuck Christmas. Along for the ride will be Random Killing and Deadly Pale.

RIP, BETTIE PAGE… JONATHAN.CUMMINS@GMAIL.COM