Happy Holidays! (you know which holiday)

You could say that last year, when it was two months after my wife died, around christmas time, I was a big, fat ball of grinch. I spent xmas eve and day in a delicious fog. I may have grunted at people. I think I slept until 4 or 5 PM and I wish it'd been longer. There were no gifts or ornaments or cheery fucking carols. My christmas was neither white nor blue, no silver bells nor green pine trees, just a greyish-brown blur of awfulness.

Did I mention that christmas is one of my favorite holidays? I'm not Christian. I was raised Jewish. But all that shameless commercialism around this time makes me just cynical enough to guiltlessly enjoy a secular xmas. Christmas memories with my wife are some of the best I have, like the year we went after halloween and bought all the clearance spiders and fake blood from that for our halloween-on-christmas tree - complete with a witch hat topper. So this year, I've decided that I'm not gonna let grief ruin everything, dammit. It's ruined enough.

It's not even December yet, and I've already hung myself...a string of lights. It just goes up the wall outlet and randomly around the ceiling. But I'm determined not to grinch it up this year. That being said, I still need all the christmas music to back the fuck off. Those songs are cute a handful of times for a few days before the 25th. But if I have to listen to them for a month straight, they make me wanna stab orphan puppies. That's not being grinchy, just a fact of nature.