Christmas Hype Will Drive Your Children To Insanity

Christmas is four days away. I know this because my kids have been counting down the days since, I dunno, LAST goddamn Christmas. Children have boring lives. They have to go to school all day. They have to listen to adults tell them what to do. They can't watch porn. It blows. Christmas is one of the few bright spots in a child's existence, and waiting for it essentially destroys their brain.

If you have kids, do yourself a favor: Don't buy your tree until, like, Christmas Eve. I bought our tree right after Thanksgiving this year, and it was the stupidest thing I've ever done. Because once the tree goes up—once the trappings of Christmas have been installed in your home—your kids then assume that Christmas will arrive in a timely manner. AND IT WON'T. If you put your tree up at the end of November, you're four weeks out from the holiday. Now, I'm a grown-up. Four weeks is nothing to me. I blink my eyes and BOOM! A month of my life has been sheared away with frightening speed. I'm hurtling faster and faster toward certain death.

But for a child, four weeks is the existential equivalent of six lifetimes. It's an ENDLESS wait. I know this because I was a kid once and the leadup to Christmas took so long, I felt as if I had been reincarnated six times before we finally got to 12/25. Children operate on stoner time. What seems like five minutes to you is EPIC to them. So multiply those five minutes over and over again into a monthlong wait to open gifts that will almost certainly end up being disappointing. That's what being a kid at Christmas is like. My kid asked for a fucking dog this year. A live dog. I'd rather have my urethra split open with a boxcutter than buy a dog. She's not getting a fucking dog. But she's had enough time to convince herself that she WILL get a dog, even when Daddy is like, "Yeah, no way. You can have a lollipop SHAPED like a fucking dog, but no actual dog."

The wait drives them to madness. They're like news anchors during an election cycle. They spend every waking moment speculating about what will happen, until they've wrapped themselves in delusion. When you walk upstairs and find your kid on the floor spinning around in circles and speaking in tongues, I promise you Christmas was responsible for that shit. It's a wonderful little holiday with an extended lead time that basically turns them into materialistic spazz demons who have no concept of patience. CHRISTMAS TOTALLY FUCKING RUINS CHRISTMAS. I hope the man who invented Christmas is dragged out into a hot desert and crucified.