Can we close Christmas? Maybe skip a year?

 Every year when it comes around, I can't help but wonder "Again?  Didn't we just have a feeding frenzy of retail therapy?"
Word association:
"Christmas"
First thing that comes to mind are the words
"Pink plastic, landfill, diabetes, jet fuel, China"
China gets the biggest Christmas present in all those manufacturing accounts.
I'm not trying to be a hater.
 Love and gathering is great, it's just the consumerism attachment and the horrible science/history that bum me out. Christmas beats the planet up. It doesn't make sense to melt our ice burg over stories that in this modern space age can be so easily dis proven or revealed to be appropriated from other religions. I can't enjoy a novel if I know the last chapter. I also don't see why it's worth the mess, pollution and hassle.
I do see the value in religion (outside of community gathering, getting kids married off, having funerals) another value I noticed is fear. There are a lot of damaged, ticking time bomb, mental rocket-sled, knuckle dragging apes out there that need fear of an invisible Dad to keep them from living full time in the reptile-mind mode. It can backfire, like in the case of the American Taliban style, anti-intilectual, gun toting, bible zealot idiots.

Our kind of critter needs to be really smart right now. Christmas dumbs everyone down.
We deserve better than that.
The memory I have of Christmas is mostly associated with the pre-teen years, as a kid.,
Back when all the tall tales they have been telling you fall out of the diaper.
No Tooth Fairy, no Jesus, No Santa, etc.
Also add the realization that not all adults are beneficial beings and our species as a whole is fully capable of killing itself in an ignorant blase of glory.
When I was in kindergarten I was led to believe the slaves lived in low wage working, singing bliss, smoking was good for you and Jimmy Carter was not. I was also given the impression that Native Americans donated their land so they could become hilarious cartoons. It was a rough curve to throw a bright kid.
After working out where i was in the space and time continuum, then I realized that the adults in my life actually did believe in one of the fairy tales...Jesus.
 That's a terrifying thing for a hyper active pubescent. I was clever enough to know the adults were using bad science but too dumb to know why.
It's like everyone in charge is agreeing on the same hallucination. A side effect is that I became a huge fan of the characters that did exist The Romans! I always rooted for the Romans in the bible stories.
I acted out a lot (and why shouldn't I, they had just introduced me to hating my penis).
 I even got demoted in Catholic Sunday school from 5th to 2nd grade for questioning the alluding of incest in that Genesis story and the laughable, implausible Noah's ark tale.
 I'm of the space age generation so by 4th grade I had a rudimentary knowledge of history and biology, none of it match the bible stuff.
Since then I gave myself some "immersion therapy" by joining lots of religions and giving them a try. I have been with Asian ladies chanting, Hare Krishna, I was a Pentecostal christian band leader, studied with Hebrew scholars and Far Eastern clerics, I even had a stint as a demonic prick.
None of it had anywhere near the ring of truth that science has. Science is correct no matter where you are. It's because it's much easier to believe something than to understand something. I see superstition in the space age to be a lazy trait. Time to upgrade the mythology.

I LOVE the friends and family part of the holidays...and the rituals too. I just think we should skip Christmas sometime and maybe re-boot the whole system. We update our software every darn day, why not the prejudiced, boring, taxing and outdated rituals? Kick off the new year with some cool stuff. Maybe the new holiday can be tricked out to include all faiths, and not be so Gift oriented. Gifts can be amazing when they are random and or needed but when it's an obligation then that can really suck...especially if you aren't religious. The Christian bible has been updated about 8 times, each time more "crazy" gets taken out. Maybe we should update Christmas. Take out the Bedouin camp legends, the Jewish apocalypse cult thing and the re-hash of the iron age comic book stories. Replace them with the Star Wars morality scale...Hobbits work too. If you want to know a lot about your religion, ask an atheist, we statistically know more than folks who have something to lose by learning too much. Do you know a big part of why we don't have all 8 of the ancient wonders of the world? Religion. Religion is an outdated meme that is just another thing turning us against science, each other and even our own bodies and body functions. I must look like a real douche-nozzle. It's cool, I know it looks bad.

I been all over this country and seen all kinds of things. I can "dial in" a situation at a glance and know what I'm looking at. Those skills are good for comedy but they are also good for seeing behind curtains and detecting carnival games. I don't want us to go out like suckers. I can't think of Thanksgiving without also seeing millions of flushes, millions of factory farmed birds, and of course the historic genocide the day covers up. I can't hear a car start up without also seeing it as one more drop of ink in the tub. The first drop wasn't noticeable but now our kind of ape dumps hundreds of drops in our fragile tub. When i hear the words "Holiday travel" it conjours an image of an inky tub...or the planet Mercury. Mercury sports the end result of global warming. I can't think of Christmas without thinking of who gets the biggest Christmas present: China and religion (YAY!) Christmas means lots of pink plastic, batteries, landfills, planned obsolescence and of course the fuel pollution and slave labor required to get all that stuff here. Christmas is a huge present for China. I get a pretty good shake in life. Random little old ladies and children run in my direction for hugs on a regular basis. I can't be doing too bad. Lots and lots of hugs in my life and I'm surrounded by really sharp people. I'm just irritated at this time of year because in my 44 years I know too much to enjoy the holidays. This is cool. I love this guy.
I had $5 and some time to kill so I thought I would blow it on some vid poker. Randomly, the only others in the place were some middle aged Native American folks and an elderly couple who looked and sounded South East Asian. The "piped in" music, was an old school Christmas song "Do you see what I see?". It's a sharp track with a cool history no lie (look it up). As the song crooned, I noticed that all of us had a pins and needles expression. It's not from losing a couple bucks, it's because if you aren't from the song's culture and background, it has different meaning. "Do you hear what I hear?" ... as soon as we all noticed each others expressions we all burst out laughing. "That's some scary shit man" one of them giggled. When i told Olive, she was mortified "I love that song", sorry hon, what we see and hear in that song is genocide. It's that same seasonal dread that I always have around this time. I'm not depressed I just haven't related to the holiday since childhood. I wish we could be gathering for a more practical reason. Maybe we can get together to take on the environmental catastrophe or maybe get everyone to see the doctor?