God Created Holidays to Test the Faithful.

Or maybe that's Dune.  I don't know.  I can never tell.  In either one, though, there's some crazy people with weird all-seeing blue eyes just looking to straight up destroy us.  Which, when you think about it is sort of weird.  I mean, blue eyes in the desert?  That seems like just a bad plan - I get that the Spice is making them more sensitive to the future, but also...more sensitive to light?  On a planet that's pretty much always bright?  Good job there, Shai-hulud.  Praise the Maker indeed.

(and no, photophobic increase in light sensitivity is not a myth.  The myth is that you're more likely to experience permanent damage due to bright lights if you have lighter colored eyes.  God, read a book.  Internet.)

Anyway, in a topic that's probably not entirely related to the struggles of Arrakis - the Holidays.  See?  I brought it back there.  After only like two paragraphs, too.  I'm getting better at this.  So - if you're in North America (like I am) or even more specifically the United States (again, like I am) you will have noticed something of late.  Something dark.  Something sinister that waits for you to show the slightest moment of weakness.  Something a lot like this tubby bastard.

You can tell he's evil.  He's smoking the pot.

The day after Halloween this year, I noticed that as stores were in the process of throwing out their plastic headstones and "bleeding" candles and whatnot that in their place they were proudly starting to display their Christmas decorations.  What what WHAT?  Christmas decorations in November?  Early November, no less?  The hell you say.  THE HELL.

I had a conversation that sounded a lot like that the other day with a member of my hilarious cast of housemates (remember them?  I know I do.)  Housemate A was upset because they were cheapening the Christmas spirit, and commercializing the holidays while even cheapening the awesomeness that is Thanksgiving, which is also too commercial these days what with all the parades and the shopping and such.

I mentioned to H-A that the only person she has to blame for things like that are shoppers who are willing to buy things so incredibly off season and patronize stores having Christmas sales this early.  She admitted that I was probably correct.  Which I was, because I'm gorram awesome.  I then told her that the simplest way to reverse this trend was if all of the people who wanted to loudly complain about this problem in person and on Facebook (which is where the 21st century goes to complain and literally do nothing else. EVER.) 

To which she responded..."but I like sales."

BAM!  Woman, you are the exact problem that you're in the process of complaining about.  And not in that way where "if you're not part of the solution, you're a part of the problem"  or "if you're not with us you're against us" or "fifty-four forty or fight!" or any of the other great propaganda slogans used throughout history.  I mean that you are the literal cause of people extending the holiday shopping season.  You spend your money and then ask them to make it so you don't need to wake up at 3:00 am on the Friday after Thanksgiving...and when they do you bitch.

As much as I love my friends and appreciate the fact that my hilarious cast of housemates allows me to continue to, ya' know, not be homeless, I find it ironic that people demand to have their needs met and then complain loudly when people are providing them a service they asked for.  

It's for reasons like that that Santa Clause has retreated deeper into his subterranean layer, forcing his elves to make ever more complicated toys (and also death rays) for the day that he rises up to take back the day that was his but has been hijacked by ingrates.  One day soon, he'll hitch up the reindeer and lay waste to the entire world in just one night.  Because, after all, the spirits can do it all in one night.

I have completely lost control of anything resembling a coherent narrative at this point. Which is, I'm sure, the problem with sitting down and talking about Santa Clause when I should be doing work.  But if I don't talk about Santa then I'm way more likely to get coal.