Xmas 2022 - Gonzo

And yet. In the wreckage of the perfect holiday, we found something real. We found the messy, unphotogenic, ugly-cry version of love. When the power flickered during dinner, plunging the dining room into darkness for ten seconds, nobody screamed. In the dark, my sister reached over and squeezed my hand. For a moment, the performance stopped. We were just people in the dark, grateful not to be alone.

There is a specific, crystalline silence that falls over a suburban street at 3:00 AM on December 26th. It is not the silence of peace, but the hollow echo of detonation—the quiet after the last firework has fizzled into mud, the last argument has slammed a door, and the last relative has backed their SUV over the garden gnome. Christmas 2022 was not a holiday. It was a live-fire exercise in cognitive dissonance. To write about it honestly, one cannot use the language of carols or greeting cards. One must go gonzo. gonzo xmas 2022

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. And yet

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. When the power flickered during dinner, plunging the

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.