Brace yourselves; the holiday season is upon is, and before you know it, it'll be beating you into submission, regardless of how many papers you've postponed writing until the last minute.
Since being at home, for however brief a time it may have been, has put me in the holiday spirit (aka the delightfully disillusioned spirit), this edition of "Pants Optional" is dedicated to all the little things (namely consumer goods) that make the Christmas/ Hanukkah/ Ramadan/ Arbor Day season all the more bearable.
First things first: scented candles. Ain't nothing in this world like a good scented candle to say, "I must be happy; I smell pine scent coming from a tiny jar!" Even better are the cookie-scented and nonsensically-named candles, such as "Snowy White Woods" and "Christmas Eve." Christmas Eve smells like scotch, mothballs and increasingly repressed hatred, so if scientists have found a way to put that into wax, I can only assume the cure for cancer is just around the corner. And in case you weren't aware, repressed hatred smells something like a mixture of Miracle Whip and possum fur.
The second thing on my list of totally awesome consumer holiday-oriented goods comes in the form of radio, which, at its root level, is still a business. Where I'm from, a glorious gumdrop and dog-feces-graced land known as New Jersey, three of the biggest radio stations switch over to an all-Christmas music format on Black Friday. Not shockingly, the month leading up to Christmas yields some of the highest ratings the stations see all year, as well as the highest prices paid for advertising airtime. I wouldn't mind these stations so much if they didn't play the same 10 songs on heavy repeat and splice in advertisements for Jonah's House of Pork between "Ave Maria" and "I Saw Mommy Boffing Santa Claus," both of which I'm pretty sure are about Santa.
Another expense that we bear in the name of holiday cheer is those damn little lights that let everyone driving by your house know there's a bunch of holly-jolly a-holes inside. As small an item as Christmas lights may seem to be, they're damn expensive, especially since three-to-four strands die of natural causes every year. I don't know about other parts of the country, but where I'm from we also engage in the age-old competition of white vs. colored lights. White lights are the tuna casserole of exterior illumination. They've got no soul; they just make your shrubberies a bit brighter than they formerly were. If I wanted that, I'd just set my front yard on fire. Again.
But after all the shenanigans of the holidays, the true meaning of this magical season is found in only one place: FOOD. No matter what may be ailing you at this point in your life, be it a lost job, a nasty divorce or simply an existential crisis, eating a ton of food to the point of uncomfortable fullness and potential vomiting always makes you feel better. So what if your morals are falling through and you've lost grasp of the true meaning of being alive? There's delicious food to be had, and for the next four hours, you can focus your discomfort towards your stomach rather than any other part of your life.
Most of what's said in this column should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, but, mind you, there's always some truth in jest. The holidays truly do bring with them more love and caring then any other time of the year, but it's buried way deep down in a bunch of other superfluous crap. Make of it what you will.
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Grant Beighley is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at Grant.Beighley@tufts.edu.
