Oh, However Will We "Survive" the Holidays? - by Jamie Paul

We all know how incredibly stressful the holiday season is — how horrific it is to spend time with our relatives, how nerve-racking shopping can be, and how the pervading sense of anxiety tinges this whole time of year. Or so we are endlessly told. The cultural cliché of the holidays as a harrowing, high-stress ordeal that we must be mentally prepared to endure has reached the echelon of self-evident truism in America. It’s the subject of inane small talk everywhere, a key feature of seasonal advertising, and a recurring theme on television shows and holiday specials. In fact, it’s become its own movie sub-genre: dysfunctional family holiday movies. A Google search for “ survive the holidays” yields 573,000 results, and a search for “ holiday survival guide” brings up more than 75,000 pages. Search for either of these without quotation marks and the results climb into the tens of millions. As an editor with several publications, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve edited at least two such “survival guides” that I can recall. We have turned giving thanks and gifts with loved ones into unanesthetized battlefield surgery or a stint in a North Korean prison camp — something that must be survived.

The problem is, this narrative is bullshit. Pure, unadulterated, steaming bullshit collectively laundered into relevance through sheer memetic repetition. This holiday season, I propose a new tradition: let’s have a little perspective and rediscover our grip on fucking reality.

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