Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 66: The Updated Good Beer Guide to Louisville (1996).
We shouldn’t attempt to fashion the elusive silk purse from a sow’s ear, which is to say that Christmas has seldom been “the most wonderful time of the year” for me. There comes a time each holiday season during an otherwise random conversation about sports, movies or the ongoing decay of Western civilization when someone looks at me with palpable dismay.
“Roger, you’re such a Grinch.” My response has never varied: “Thank you very much.” After all, I was raised to be polite.
The roots of my longstanding Yuletide antipathy might be traced to Freudian conceits, Jungian counter-thrusts, references to childhood toilet training habits or the sheer pervasiveness of psychological repression stemming from residency in the USA amid all these crazed theists, but in truth it’s far simpler.
The gist of it is the original, defining moment in every American boy’s life — not when it becomes clear that he’ll die without the saving grace of having been able to hit a curveball, but the sudden, gut-wrenching discovery that in spite of the incessant, shameless propaganda fed to kids by adults, who’d assured us that a regimen of excruciating behavioral self-regulation would be rewarded by a gaudily costumed fat man parking his tricked-out sleigh on the roof and descending the chimney, that nope, in the end, it was nothing more than a shameless ruse.
Or, when the truth finally hits you: Santa Claus doesn’t really exist. At all. More radicals have been created during this precise moment of magnetic illumination than by any number of Marxist texts or consumer boycotts.
Our house didn’t even have a chimney, and you’d think this might have made me suspicious, but I remained oblivious far longer than was defensible. When the shameful day of infamy arrived and my school mate chided me – “c’mon, sucker, don’t tell me you still believe in Santa?” — I did much more than merely shake Santa’s fictitious grip, cold turkey, there on the spot.
I irrevocably disavowed the whole contrived Christmas spectacle, because...Read more
