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.
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
Christmas morning arrived not with angels singing, but with the sound of a malfunctioning space heater and the smell of burnt coffee. The family gathered. We performed the rituals: the ripping of foil, the exclamations over socks, the passive-aggressive glances at the uncle who drank the good bourbon before noon. The fluorescent dinosaur was a success—a five-minute dopamine blast followed by a meltdown when the batteries died. It wasn't just consumerism; it was frantic consumerism