Merry Christmas, such as it is

It doesn't really feel like Christmas this year, even though I've been baking my ass off getting ready. I guess last year I looked at my financial situation and said, "So what, I'm buying gifts anyway!" Not this year.

My card this year reflects the bleakness that I'm feeling. I felt bad about sending it out, especially after I started to get really nice cards from friends everywhere, cards whose sentiments lifted the despair from me for a little while at least. But a lot of people who received the card have gotten a kick out of it, so I guess maybe I've brightened their days, too.

Naturally, there's a story behind this card.

The story is that when I tried to come up with a design for this year's card, I realized that my printer is all out of color ink. (The empty cartridge in my printer was installed 12/5/07 to print out last year's Christmas gifts, so it served its purpose well.) So I would have to come up with a black and white design, or bite the bullet and get a new (or refilled) cartridge.

I toyed with a few black-and-white designs, and then a thought hit me: what if I ran out of black ink while printing these? I decided then that the card would be spare, minimalistic, to an extreme degree. I had an idea what it would look like, and least the front of it, and I had to find an appropriate typewriter font. (This one is called CarbonType, though the lines on the inside of the card are in VTCorona.) A 12-point font looked better, but I opted for the smaller 10-point.

I was going to list holidays inside the card, but I did that in a previous year, so instead I listed a group of characteristics and time lengths that could apply. (Most people had all of the items checked, though for friends in bands I left the "Silent" line unchecked.)

The kicker is the last line. In previous years my friends and I have expressed confidence that the coming year could not possibly suck as badly as the one we had been though, but every time we had been proven wrong. So this year I only expressed this as a hope.

As Tiny Tim said in A Christmas Carol, "God bless us, every one."

Or, as The Comedian said to Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, "God help us all."

Which, I suppose, is never a bad sentiment.

Merry Christmas 2005 from Another Monkey!

My card design for 2005: Three-O-Nina, at the forefront of the culture wars!

I was looking to see if the owners had dressed up Three-O-Nina at all for Christmas. For a twelve-foot-tall cow she's actually quite easy to overlook, and I had to focus my attention to actually see her as I drove by. But when I did, I nearly crashed my car laughing, and knew I would have to be back in the daylight hours with a camera.

For those unaware of the internal religio-politico environment in the United States, there is an increasingly militant debate going on between religious extremists on the one hand who feel that Christmas is the sole property of Christianity and any attempt to secularize it or recognize heathen festivals like that newfangled Hanukkah thing is a direct affront to the One True Religion, and secular extremists on the other hand who are striving to create an air of inclusion by excluding any recognition of religious connotations to the holiday. Most Americans, of course, have compromised by treating the days following Thanksgiving and the entire month of December as an orgy of consumerism called "Christmas" while also respecting the religious aspect of the holiday (for Christians, anyway) by making it one of the two days out of the entire year they actually go to Church. (The other is Easter. We call these "Lily and Poinsettia Christians.")

I find the entire debate preposterous, but soon I think the religious extremists will begin to employ the same tactics to this debate that they freely utilize in the abortion debate (namely arson, bombings, death threats, and assassinations.) Those wacky religious extremists, always ready to kill in the name of the Prince of Peace.

But in the meantime I find this image itself preposterous. Someone saw fit to use a twelve-foot-tall cow to remind us to "KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS." Somehow the Gospel writers skipped over the bit about the GIANT FREAKIN' COW that was hanging out by the manger. And I shudder to think what would have happened if that cow had felt a bit peckish and decided to snack on the hay in the manger, and failed to notice the little baby dressed in swaddling clothes laying there...

Merry Christmas, everybody!