2022 !!top!! - Gonzo Xmas

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.

So, as the sun sets on that memory, I raise a glass of leftover eggnog—which is mostly bourbon—to the Gonzo Christmas. To the year we finally realized that sanity had gone on vacation and we were left to run the asylum. It was loud, it was expensive, it was deeply, profoundly unhinged. But it was ours. And in the fear and the loathing, we were, for a fleeting moment, actually alive. 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. This is the moment the fear and loathing sets in

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. Without the ham, the family will fracture

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.

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.

That is the gonzo truth of Christmas 2022. It was not a silent night. It was a cacophony of supply chain failures, viral respiratory infections (a “mild cold” that felled three cousins), and the ghost of inflation haunting every grocery receipt. It was a nation trying to anesthetize its collective trauma with cinnamon-scented candles.