I am no longer going to cel­e­brate Christmas.

2003 has been a long and con­fus­ing year, and there was a point when I was look­ing for­ward to this hol­i­day as some kind of release; per­haps maybe, just maybe, this would be the joy­ous occa­sion it's oft touted to be.

I may have been ask­ing for too much. Either that, or my let­ter to the North Pole got lost in the mail.

Instead, I found many peo­ple I care about in less-than-desirable sit­u­a­tions that just made me feel bad because there was noth­ing I could do for them. Mean­while, I returned from a day-long stint in the hos­pi­tal with a large bot­tle of pills to ease the bac­te­ria that spread through my body like a brush fire and landed squarely in my left ear. (As I write this, I still have no hear­ing in that one.)

There's sim­ply too much time and stress involved in this "fes­tive sea­son" to make it enjoy­able any­more. That didn't used to be in the case. Once upon a long, long time ago, I liked ven­tur­ing to the mall, tak­ing in the dec­o­ra­tions, the choir music, and going through each store, pick­ing out things for peo­ple that reminded me of them or that I thought they would like.

Now, something's just.…missing. Something's not the same. It could be me. I really don't know.

Shop­ping feels like a chore, a require­ment. And I've dis­cov­ered that that mind­set really tends to take the fun out of the experience.

Com­pounded on top of all this excite­ment, I've been told that I'm "dif­fi­cult" to shop for. I nor­mally take issue with this belief, but I also know that at times I can be very, very spe­cific about things and become so jaded that any­thing else is just unac­cept­able. That's my issue, I know, and it espe­cially comes out at Christ­mas­time; hence why, when asked by friends or fam­ily what I would like, I usu­ally reply with some­thing like, "A gift­card to $store."

Silly, really.

I sup­pose part of the rea­son­ing (or lack thereof) for my hol­i­day malaise is that I know there's only one thing that I really really want, one thing that would really make me happy.…and that's the only thing that I can't have. Because some­one else got the one I wanted, so instead I'm sit­ting here twid­dling my thumbs… Like I said, I'm occa­sion­ally very picky. And, unfor­tu­nately, noth­ing else will do. At least not now.

Santa, you bastard.

* * *

All of this has led me to pub­licly denounce Christ­mas. Instead, this year and for years on for­ward, I will per­son­ally cel­e­brate Christ­mas 2: Elec­tric Buga­loo, a new hol­i­day being spon­sored by the Mis­tress Domes­ti­cat and myself. Details are sketchy at this point, but so far, what we have come up with is the following:

Like I said, more will be worked out at some point. But, hell, we needed some­thing. Fotos and reports from the first annual C2:EB will be forth­com­ing. For now, though, much nefar­i­ous planning.