Every year, all this weird, petty "Merry Christmas" v. "Happy Holidays" stuff. I suspect this dumpster fire of a year has a lot to do with the escalation of Giving a Shit About Trivialities that seems to be taking over the internet.
So, in the spirit of the season, I shall toss my hat in the ring with "Happy Christmas, Hail Satan."
I think that sorts it out.
It's been a mad, mad week for Bird and I over here in Maine. A faceless mass of joyless people searching for the lowest price for days on end: these are the rapturous pleasures of retail. But it's easy to be bitter when you've fallen into the holiday rut and drudge through the trenches of holly and tinsel.
It's a lot harder to be cynical when you're sitting in the purple glow of a little Christmas tree covered in Hallowe'en bat lights, skull jewelry, dog teeth, and chains, with 90s doom metal drifting through the dim, warm room. Trinity is curled next to me on the sofa, breathing quietly against a pillow, her ears and feet sketching the edges of a dream of fields of snow that's always fresh. She rests and runs and her breathing is slow and even.
The room is spiced and made mutable by a candle in the corner, casting everything in soft-edged shades of cinnamon.
Across the room, my wife has sanded the art of the bottom of a skateboard, and is painting a vagina on the bare birchwood in vivid acrylic pinks and reds and umbers. She's just caught me looking up at her. She smiles. She has paint on her the backs of her fingers, smutch from her brushes.
I'd meant to tell you about Lo-Fi Lullabies, and mastering the tracks, and where you'll be able to find it, and when. But then I looked around and saw that it was Christmas Eve, and more than that, it was my Christmas Eve; mine and Bird's.
Tonight and tomorrow are what you make them. Don't listen to the grumpy people on the internet (and, more importantly, don't be the grumpy people on the internet).
Cheers, and Happiness to you and yours.
--Max Peterson,
on Christmas Eve, nestled in Comfort and Joy
(The metal band is Paradise Lost, by the way. I can't recommend them highly enough, particularly their 1991 album Gothic, though, admittedly, they are not everybody's Holiday Classic Cup of Tea.)