Meh

Ambivalence.

Over the years, my attitude toward the “holiday season” has changed pretty often.

Every kid loves Christmas, right? I mean, Christmas is a great thing, especially for kids.

But then you learn to drive… And you get to experience the joys of winter storm driving…

I worked in Hotels (for about 15 years), I worked every single New Year’s Eve. If you ever want to earn a bitter, cynical viewpoint toward mankind—spend some time working the Front Desk on NYE night and dealing with the “happy” drunks destroying the hotel, annually. Nothing could possible make you more disgusted with the way alleged adults misbehave.

(Except maybe the average Wedding party.)

There’s no question that I’m still “down” on the Drinking Holidays. I simply do not, and will never, approve of them. Drunks are just plain sad. But at least Hotel-confined drunks aren’t on the highways killing people!! Better to be destroying a hotel room than somebody else’s life, I suppose.

Christmas. I don’t like how commercialized it is, or how early we start Selling It here in America. So I’m certainly much more negative towards Christmas than I once was.

Still.

The holidays are not all bad. Seriously, there are some good things about the holiday season. More time spent with your families, time off from work! People aren’t all bad, all the time—aside from shopping crowds, they’re less grumpy generally during the holidays.

So…okay, maybe to be honest, I don’t get a lot of joy from holidays, but that’s probably because I’m grumpy and cynical and jaded. An old curmudgeon. Hey you kids, get off my lawn!

Give me a hug, Mom. I wish I could get more of those.

Oh, wait. Christmas is right around the corner. I totally can. Sweet.

It really is the little things

The holiday season: can’t get enough of it, or can’t wait for it all to be over already? Has your attitude toward the end-of-year holidays changed over the years?

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Antisanta

Do you remember that scene where the Grinch is shoving the Christmas tree, decorations and toys back up the chimney? That’s kind of what I do.

My name is Da7in (or some netizens know me as Anti-Claus) and I am what you would probably call a “hacker”. For the past several years, I have been working on reversing the first world’s annual grotesque materialistic feeding frenzy. No I don’t wear a red suit, I don’t have a jolly beard, I don’t have sleigh or reindeer. I work in mostly blue jeans and t-shirt.

I also don’t work at the consumer end, removing materialistic icons from people’s homes. My work is more effective from supply-side.

I break into the systems of big-ticket retailers and reroute their shipping. I’ve sent entire cargo planes of Fedex’d merchandise to the wrong places; to Latin America or Ethiopia instead of Cleveland. I’ve routed shipping transport from overseas to southern hemisphere ports instead of the States.

I’ve deprived Lego of plastics shipments, and deleted Target advertising promos from Madison Avenue marketing firms, replaced the ABC network’s “Charlie Brown Christmas Special” broadcast with old episodes of “F-Troop”.

My latest target has been the entertainment industry, particularly the smarmy Christmas movie projects. I’ve routed entire Amazon stockpiles of “feel good and buy lots of stuff hohoho” movies for delivery directly to trash dumps. You’ve probably heard of the Sony scandal in your TV news just recently; yep, I had a hand in that, even if the network talking heads have most of the details wrong.

They’re after me now, the Mega-retailers. Working with the FBI to track my traffic back through the router hops. I’ve even got emails from a high-level exec at Walmart confirming a private security mercenary outfit that’s been contracted to take me out the moment they find me. Twenty million price tag. Apparently I’m making a splash, some small dent in their billions in profits.

I honestly don’t know how much longer I can get away with messing with America’s material joy. The beast is just too large, too rich, and too well-entrenched to slay.

I just know that when I am caught, you will never hear a word about it.

Inside literary snob-ish joke: “OMG, am >I< John Galt?” “No, no, we are.”