Gonzo Xmas 2022 Fixed -

This is the moment the fear and loathing sets in. You realize the entire apparatus of cheer is a fragile house of cards. Without the dinosaur, Christmas is ruined. Without the ham, the family will fracture. Without the right lighting for the TikTok video, the memory is invalid. We had turned the celebration of incarnation and goodwill into a logistics nightmare, and the real horror was that we all knew it. We were Sisyphus, but the boulder was a spiral-cut honey-baked ham and the hill was an icy driveway.

The gonzo lesson of that Christmas is this: the consumerist hallucination is dead. It died in a Target parking lot in 2020 and we spent two years trying to resuscitate it. The joy of 2022 wasn't in the flawless execution of the tradition; it was in the glorious, spectacular failure of it. It was in the burnt cookies and the political argument that fizzled out because everyone was too tired to fight. It was in the acceptance that “ho ho ho” is often just a defense mechanism against the abyss. gonzo xmas 2022

So, as the sun sets on that memory, I raise a glass of leftover eggnog—which is mostly bourbon—to the Gonzo Christmas. To the year we finally realized that sanity had gone on vacation and we were left to run the asylum. It was loud, it was expensive, it was deeply, profoundly unhinged. But it was ours. And in the fear and the loathing, we were, for a fleeting moment, actually alive. This is the moment the fear and loathing sets in

Tuesday. Christmas was Sunday.

It wasn't just consumerism; it was frantic consumerism. People weren't buying the latest PlayStation or a weighted blanket for Aunt Carol; they were buying normalcy . They were throwing credit cards at a wall of supply-chain shortages, hoping something—anything—would stick. The shelves were empty of the specific brand of canned pumpkin, but overflowing with a terrifying anxiety that you could taste in the air, like burnt wiring. We were all trying to decorate a house that was actively on fire. Without the ham, the family will fracture

My own gonzo Christmas began, as all bad ideas do, with a promise to keep things “low-key.” Low-key, in the post-2020 lexicon, is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid admitting we’ve forgotten how to be joyful. By December 23rd, I was standing in a parking lot at 9 PM, the icy rain turning the asphalt into a mirror of my own haggard face. I was looking for a specific toy—a fluorescent, screaming dinosaur that my nephew would likely forget by New Year’s Eve. The store was out. The clerk, a teenager with the dead eyes of a combat medic, shrugged. “Amazon says Tuesday,” he mumbled.