'Tis the Season to Be Snarly

My regular readers--all, um, five of you--may be wondering what crawled up my butt and died this holiday season. It's fair to ask. After all, I'm healthy, employed and blessed with great friends. What do I have to be so pissy about?

Well...

Part of it is just my personality. I can be, as has been noted by more than one friend, moody as hell. And when I get in one of my "moods," I can be a chore to deal with. This personality "quirk" is only enhanced by Christmastime, which can be a time of great emotion even if you're not an emotionally unstable freak monkey.

But it's not just that. My Christmas spirit--what little of it I can find under the microscope, anyway--has taken some hits, including last year, when I was compelled to take down my holiday decorations at work. It wasn't just that I was asked to remove the "Sandy Claws" Jack Skellington figure (with matching Sally, of course) and the tin windup Santa and the Pez dispensers from the top of my cubicle wall. That was bad enough, especially considering that many of my co-workers had commented on how much they enjoyed the, er, festive nature of the display. But what made it worse was that the company higher-up who had the problem with the decorations made my supervisor, who had no problem with what I'd set up, do the dirty work and make me take it all down.

This wasn't even the first time such a thing had happened to me at work. At a previous job, the company president complained to one of my supervisors (again, not directly to me) that the red pepper lights I had strung in my work cave were "too much." And he told said supervisor this loud enough for me to hear it. Before the supervisor was even out of her office, I'd literally torn the red pepper lights down. And I would have taken all of my decorations--including the 3-ft. artificial tree loaded with ornaments--home that day if not for the fact that it would have been an enormous pain in the ass to do so.

Am I being overly sensitive about this? Probably so. Work is work, and I'm certainly not required to be the "holiday morale officer" in the office, even though the company I currently work for is so devoid of seasonal cheer that we don't do a tree or menorah or really anything. (We do have a wreath in the lobby, but I'm not sure whether we bought that ourselves or whether the building we work in provided it for us.) But decorating my cubicle helped get me in the mood for shopping and singing and drinking myself stupid (like it takes much to get me to do that or to make me stupid). And this year, aside from Rudolph and Clarice action figures flanking my work iMac, my cube is bereft of holiday cheer.

So I'm trying to pull myself together on the home front, lighting pine-scented candles from Walgreen's (which have the price listed as ".99¢," which would literally mean that they cost less than a penny; as a co-worker pointed out to me, though, bring this up as an issue with the checkout clerk would likely get me maced, and that's not very festive, now is it?) throughout the apartment, turning on the pepper lights and the tiny lighted fake tree on my end table, and cranking up the tunes on my CD player.

Among the holiday-themed CDs getting the most work this year:

THE VENTURES' CHRISTMAS ALBUM. Holiday standards recast into a surf-guitar-rock motif sound surprisingly fresh. And it's really short (as are most holiday CDs by specific artists), so it amounts to an audio snack.

THE MOST FABULOUS CHRISTMAS ALBUM EVER. The title is a vast overstatement, but this CD does feature some signature tunes, including Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby," Perry Como's remarkably snarky "(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays" and Guy Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne."

BOOKER T. & THE MGs: IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT. Just as the Ventures recast traditional songs in their style, so R&B legends Booker T. & the MGs do here, with Booker's keyboard work (on both piano and organ) complementing the guitar play of Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn (both of whom later played in the Blues Brothers Band). Their cover of "White Christmas" is downright beautiful, and the whole album manages to be respectful and playful at the same time.

SWINGIN' CHRISTMAS. It begins with Louis Prima, end with Louis Armstrong and has lots of jumpin' and jivin' in between to a holiday sandwich that's truly tasty.

ELLA FITZGERALD'S CHRISTMAS. The oddball in my Christmas collection, as I'm agnostic and all of the songs on this CD are religious. But Ella's voice makes them special and effective, and the arrangements are straightforward and simple rather than overly jazzy. A beautiful album.

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. Just about everyone I know owns this one. And if any one of them ever claimed to have never done the Snoopy Dance around their living room, I'd call 'em a liar.

There are a couple of other CDs I've been spinning of late, but I'll talk about them another time. And there are holiday movies that I favor; these, too, will be discussed at another time.

The whole point, though, is this: I'm trying. I really am. I may be trying too hard or not hard enough, but I'm making the effort to get into the spirit of the season. And maybe those efforts will pay off. Maybe.

For now, though...I'd better get cracking on those Christmas cards, hadn't I? Less than three weeks to go...