I know I'm not just speaking for myself here when I point out, with utter dismay, that there was a time when people shared their Christmas spirit with the neighborhood by covering their house, and maybe their shrubbery, in strings of lights, and it was quite beautiful. But holiday tackiness found an opening somewhere and began to seep in: first those wire-frame light reindeer — like, we know that Dancer and Prancer aren't on your front lawn, cause we live in New Jersey and not the Yukon — which gave way to inflatable Santas, ratty plastic Nativity scenes, and cardboard Grinch cut-outs. But maybe two Christmases ago, the neighbors — yours and mine, and you know who I'm talking about — decided they'd snatch all the undeserved holiday attention on the street by leaving a giant inflatable snow-globe in their front yards.

Which is bad enough on its own, but I was in Drug Fair this morning, passed by one of those balloon snow-globes with a price tag on it, and realize that people actually pay money for this gaudy kitsch! A six-foot snow-globe goes for about two-hundred dollars — two-hundred dollars that could theoretically be exchanged for goods and services is instead going to uglying up someone's house, and that makes me very sad. I mean, you can drop a beat-up '88 Oldsmobile with three wheels and one cement brick on your lawn for free. Wrap it up in blinking colored lights for Yuletide; you can even use those mesh net lights if your holiday spirit is only matched by your laziness.

I would go around town with a BB gun, deflating all this crap, but you know... it is Christmas and all.

Have a Very Polemic Christmas

Here's an article in the NY Times Sunday Styles section — which I don't read — about the latest trend in eco-friendly holiday gift giving, and the resentment it creates among some people who do read the Sunday Styles section. The holiday drama starts with a socially conscious nucleus gift-giving handmade recycled crafts or charitable donations and the once-valent rest of the family, expecting real presents, turning resentful. Not to mention euphemistic: "We spent so many years so poor, where we didn’t have the money to do much,” said Cynda Reznicek, whose sister gave her a compact flourescent light bulb last Christmas. "We're at the point now where we can be a little more extravagant.... It's just a joy."

This is the point where I fruitlessly remind you how Christmas is supposed to be about the birth of our Savior, and peace on Earth, and mirthful times with your friends and (possibly politically backward) family, and spreading Christianity by co-opting a pagan solstice festival. But that's not what struck me.

I always thought there was this tacit rule in society that when someone gets you a gift, even if it's a light bulb — which, let's be honest here, ranks above underpants and below socks — you're either under twelve years old or otherwise at least feigning gratitude, you selfish jerk!

Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar on environmental issues at the American Enterprise Institute — I'll point out that's not really any sort of credentials on this issue, but anyway — accidentally clears up the spirit of gift-giving: "The point of the holidays for many people is the joy people get in giving." No... if you're bitching about what you unwrapped, then the point of the holiday is the joy you get in receiving, potlatch be damned. You know, every family has their Christmas issues, and most of those are way more trivial than the health of our entire planet. The difference is the twenty-five year old rivalry between your two uncles because one got a car as a graduation gift back in 1982 and the other didn't doesn't manifest itself when presents get unwrapped. "A power drill! That fixes everything, for the remaining hour we have to be in the same room."

I'm not judging, although avarice does rot your soul, but the gift is supposed to be a gesture of generosity and not a fantasy of watching football on a big TV or impressing your girlfriends with designer shoes. It's one thing to expect something else, but to actually complain about the light bulb is the mark of someone who, next year, seriously deserves to get shit. (I was going to say "coal," but an environmentalist wouldn't give coal as a gift.)

Christmas Windows (for the last time): Lord & Taylor and Macy's

I'm glad I saved the best Christmas windows for last. Lord & Taylor has an antique postcard theme, and while I'm not big on Victorian Christmases, I feel like they did a very nice job, nostalgic without being sappy and full of little details that made each scene really worth examining. They put up blown-up duplicates of real postcards from the late 1800's and early 1900's, and they reproduced other postcards in full three-dimensional diorama mode. The puppetry wasn't quite as technologically advanced as in the Saks windows, but they enhanced the vignettes, giving them a focal point that you'd drift away from but always return to. Saks felt like a pop-up book in comparison.

Macy's also did a really impressive job with their Christmas windows. I mean, really impressive — there was some story about Christmas trees or something, but who cares? They had a fire-breathing dragon with video-camera eyes! And a polar bear! And the whole thing's interactive!

You touch a little star on the window and the lion in the display, for instance, comes to life and roars, or the snowmen start playing the drums, or the mermaid (!?) comes out of her, uh, clam. I guess they ran out of Christmas-themed ideas, so the Macy's "Tree of Joy" window is an underwater fantasy scene. Kind of takes you out of the moment. But the whole interactive thing is a bit of a problem, since the windows are crowded with little kids trying to touch them, and I'm standing there, all patient, but I WANT TO TOUCH THE WINDOWS!!! Too bad it's Christmas and you can't just pick the kids up and drop them in front of the window with a bottle of perfume (Estee Lauder on 1). If I lived in the city, I'd stop by at two in the morning and spend the whole night playing with the Christmas windows.

Christmas Windows: Bloomingdale's

The holiday theme at Bloomingdale's this year is "The World Celebrates," about different Christmas traditions around the world. Except it's a little, well, Eurocentric. Each window is a papier-mâché display of Christmas legends in Ireland, Greece, Sweden, Italy with a two-sentence blurb about what you're looking at. In Italy, your presents come courtesy of La Befana: The Magi invited her to come on their journey to receive the Christ child, but she was too busy cleaning her house and declined. Now, racked with guilt, she delivers gifts to all good boys and girls throughout Italy, apparently relieving some of the burden from Santa. In Russia, they tell children the story of Grandfather Frost, who made a girl out of snow for a childless couple.

It's too bad the Bloomingdale's people used up all these stories in a single year, because they could've milked them for a couple of Christmases. The La Befana story and Grandfather Frost could both merit a whole series of windows, instead of the diffuse two-sentence treatment they got, pandering to the parochial, attention span-deprived demographic. They had some windows explaining the holiday traditions here in America, in case you're not familiar with Santa Claus. And did you know that there's this holiday called Chanukah? I didn't. Thank you, Bloomingdale's, for educating me!

Christmas Windows: Saks Fifth Avenue

Saks Fifth Avenue traditionally puts on the most jejune Christmas windows of all the New York City department stores — always some bland kiddy holiday story full of aspartame and pixie dust. Little Billy and Susie, the whitest of white animorphic dolls — our protagonists are always white, unless this year is a diversity themed Christmas — sneak up to their attic on Christmas Eve and find a magical telescope that lets them watch Santa bring toys to good, presumably Christian, children all over the world. Even Dr. Seuss, if he were alive, would be like, "Whoa, that's a little too saccharine for me."

Oh, I almost forgot, the narrative is etched on the windows with those rub-on letters, but they have a tape loop reading it aloud, too. So you know who their audience is: four-year-olds. Because toddlers have a ton of disposable income. I think Barney's Christmas display gets offended that you have the nerve to look it right in the eye, but at least they know who they're marketing to.

This year's story was, uh... a weird cross between Leonid the Magnificent and a kinky icicle fetish. It's like the window designers were on angel dust this year. Okay, our herione, no pun intended, is "an ice crystal who was known as Allie." That thing on the right is Allie The Passive Voice Ice Crystal; I guess she's in a pairs figure skating competition or something, and I'd make more fun of her outfit, except it's really not that bad once you see the other anthropomorphized ice crystals in the story and what they're wearing. Allie is looking around for a snowflake of other blue-haired albino dolls to join. I'm sure we can all relate.

Next window: Allie floats by a snowflake of scantily-clad anorexic ice crystal ballerinas. Look at these role models for young girls. The fabric goes over your body, not around it. There's also this fat nerd snowflake, and he's got no chance with these vapid bitches. God, I hate them. They won't let him in their snowflake, lunch table, or nightclub. But Allie, bless her heart, takes pity on Nearsighted Dork Ice Crystal, and they become bestest buddies.

I'm calling bullshit right now. First, there's no way in hell Allie's not joining that ballerina snowflake. We all know they thought her fugly, slutty dress was totally cute and they invited her into their stupid clique. And second, never in the history of man nor trillions and trillions of snowflakes has a hot babe ice crystal passed up the opportunity to join the popular snowflake to hang out with the buck-toothed, pencil-necked, beanie-wearing melvin.

Third window: Allie and her new dweeb-alicious friend run into this ice crystal dude, named Chip. Really. No offense to everybody named Chip out there, but I don't even know how people wind up with that name, let alone ice crystals. What does that list of baby names look like, that Chip is the best option? Scratch, Dent, Blemish — no, I guess we'll go with Chip. And for a snowflake? It's worse than naming your sussex spaniel Kevin... but not quite as bad as naming your child Kal-el because you suck as a parent. Okay, I'm done.

And I forgot to mention that the nerdy ice crystal is named Tay-Tay. Yeah, he looks like a Tay-Tay.

Here's Chip. He's floating alone because he's just too wacky and free-spirited and — let's be honest — gay for all those bourgeios snowflakes. But Chip looks like he's cool with it. He's smiling and waving, so I don't know if it's such a huge personal growth moment for him when Allie and Tay-Tay invite him into their circle of merry ice crystals.

By now I've written at least twenty times more words than this story actually consists of, so I'll speed it up. Alice, Tay-Tay, and Chip meet Winnie, who — surprise, surprise — can't find a snowflake to join.Winnie is, uh... "special." I mean, I'd like to give a lot of credit to the artists who built this whole display, and I know their work probably started even before Christmas of last year, but couldn't they put his/her pupils in the center of his/her eyes? He/she looks like he/she just had a stroke. Try explaining that one to the kids.

And while you're at it: try explaining where this baby ice crystal's arms and legs went. And how two ice crystals make a baby ice crystal in the first place. Or maybe they reproduce asexually. Maybe explain to the kids how ice crystals masturbate, especially since hands don't seem to come standard.

Final window: Alice, Tay-Tay, Chip, Winnie, and Baby Ice Crystal decide they can all join hands and become their own misfit snowflake! Yay! Except they don't so much join hands as they all sort of meld into this creepy Siamese quintuplet thing that spins around, and it's all totally messed up. Also, Tay-Tay lost his glasses in the final window. I guess he had LASIK surgery. But as someone who wears glasses, I find this offensive! It's like they're saying everyone who wears thick, horn-rimmed glasses is a friendless louse who'll never have a snowflake to call his own. I'm sick and tired of all these mostly accurate stereotypes about people with glasses! God, it almost makes me want to learn how to poke contacts into my eyes.

I guess here's the Christmas lesson. Everyone is their own unique, special ice crystal, although not necessarily special in the way that Winnie is special. Be yourself. Then, find the one single sympathetic snowflake girl out of the trillions of snowflakes and fuse together with her and three of her weirdo friends in a totally non-sexual way. Gee, they never covered that in The Christmas Shoes.

Christmas Windows: Barney's and FAO Schwarz

One of my favorite things about Christmas in the city are the department store windows, where once a year, the standard homage to overpriced crap gets replaced with a creative holiday-themed homage to overpriced crap. They're baroque and fabulously gay, but in an innocuous way that's cool with the tourists from the flyover states, who are already getting into the Christmas spirit by complaining that Jesus is missing from the decorations. I'm always hoping for some sort of abstract, minimalist Christmas style — which I usually find inside the stores — or failing that, something that isn't ridiculous and puerile. I'm usually disappointed.

Okay, the Barney's windows are never puerile; they're designed for New York's old money, literati elite who are photographed in the Sunday Styles section of the Times and get invited to opening night for new exhibits at the MoMA. You know, people who keep up with the Joneses by shopping at Barney's. This year Barney's asks you to spend heartily and wishes you Happy Andy Warhol-idays, which doesn't even make any sense, except that Barney's is doing this commemorative soup can cross-promotion thing with Campbells.There's over a hundred dollars worth of soup in that picture — twelve bucks a can, and they're crazy popular. I'm guessing that Barney's salespeople work on commission, because it brought tears of holiday joy to my eyes to watch them snatch the last cans in the store out of each others' hands for whoever's phone customer could place the bigger order. Santa would be so proud of us.

I haven't been to F.A.O. Schwarz since they re-opened two years ago, and I'm not a fan of the changes, starting with the candy-colored kiddie-Starbucks ice cream parlor in the back, serving seven-dollar milkshakes. Please, F.A.O. Schwarz, we can't afford that! We just spent $12,000 on a life-sized stuffed woolly mammoth doll, trying to purchase our child's love! We're broke!The worst part is the woolly mammoth — none of the life-sized animals really — isn't huggable. It's felt sewn over a hard shell. I'd rather have one of the cuddly animals they sell for $29.95.

What's really going to take some getting used to with F.A.O. Schwarz is that the new store is just too neat and organized.F.A.O. Schwarz used to be the world's greatest toy box, with playthings spilling out of every conceivable corner, and now it's like Mommy made you clean your room. I'm sure she's happy that she can walk around without stepping on shit like random Legos and Chronicles of Narnia action figures and other people's kids, but this fantasy playworld resents grown-up rules. It feels like an Apple Store or something. Maybe they'll someday throw in a ballpit and even things out.

I'm going to spread some holiday cheer this year by telling kids everywhere that their parents lied to them about Santa Claus. Don't worry… I'm not a grinch. But I am sitting in the furniture section at Macy's listening to Kenny G's other Christmas album, so maybe it's not the greatest time to be try being merry. Anyway: The truth about Christmas is that there are really two jolly old men who fly around delivering presents to boys and girls on Christmas Eve. There's Santa Claus and Santa's bizarro evil twin brother, Rolf Claus, who lives on the South Pole and brings gifts to misbehaving heathen children throughout the world. Rolf brings the cool toys that your parents don't want you to have. Because you're adopted and they don't love you!

Rolf flies through the Yuletide night on, let's say, a magical yacht with his mistress, her hot but totally naïve sister, and their nymphomaniac best friend. Thirty thousand trained weasels pull the yacht around the world one night a year, and spend the rest of their time living with Rolf on the South Pole in his mansion made of gingerbread and tacky diamond-studded bling P. Diddy gave him for his twenty-eighth birthday. I mean, the weasels don't live in the mansion, of course; they're caged in an unheated facility two miles away from Rolf's mansion and fed a rabid, emaciated puppy once every two or three weeks. Rolf pays an Indonesian kid to clean up after the weasels, but it's okay because Ardhi is getting a TMX Elmo for Christmas this year. He plans to sell it on eBay to some snotty American with fat, overstimulated, snotty American kids to get rice and clean water for his village.

What? Don't give me that look. Rolf Claus isn't real or anything! So sensitive…

Big Christmas Announcement

You're not gonna believe how tonight's Rockefeller Center tree lighting ended: the lights WENT ON!!! Oh my God! I was watching and the suspense was just killing me. Would the lights go on? Would the tree fall over? Would Al Roker forget what the next number was in the countdown? Would this event be different from last year's tree lighting in any way at all?

I Ruin Two Perfectly Good Holiday Movies For You

It's the most wonderful time of the year again, even if global warming and El Niño conspire to turn this into not so much a white Christmas as a palm tree and mudslide Christmas. I love the season: the lights, the gift-getting (uh, I mean, gift-giving... exactly), the peace on earth and goodwill towards men, or at least those men who aren't standing between you and a brand-new Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart. But just one thing: you think we could back off with the novelty Christmas music just a little? The season's cheesy enough without The Waitresses putting their inane holiday story of missed connections to bubble-gum music. I might be a little more tolerant if we didn't also have incredibly tacky people putting giant inflatable snowglobes on their front lawns just like Jesus commanded in the Book of Christopher Lowell or fascist mass-marketed holiday cinema claiming to be about the "true spirit of the holidays."

No matter what, though, I feel like Klezmonauts' Oy To The World: A Klezmer Christmas has a certain eclectic charm to it, like I wouldn't play it at John Gibson's "War on Christmas" party, but it could be an interesting change of pace. Alan Jackson's adorable Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk on Christmas), is superfluous, no matter how much it might reflect the typical redneck holiday. Joe Pesci's Christmas album contains the f-word, a lot — because he's on a school bus with a bunch of fifth-graders? Maybe Joe can lighten up a bit with next album and stick with the classics, like "Batman Smells" and "Deck the Halls with Gasoline."

There are some common themes here: these established jazz and techno outlets re-interpret the classics in a loungey, semi-sophisticated way that's good for a month or so; the Jews have their self-deprecating songs of Christmas rejection; the pop stars pander; and the country singers tell stories of running over Donner and Blitzen with their pickup trucks, throwing the reindeer in back, and having the best, most drunken Christmas dinner ever.

And then there's the Christian pop group NewSong, and you can tell they're Christian because they think we're all just a little too happy with the whole Feliz Navidad attitude. (Also, the titles of their songs — Blessed Be Your Name, Arise My Love, and Wonderful Maker — sort of give them away.) Last year, our local pop radio station, which normally inundates my car with enough Creed to make me think they've got some sort of agenda, was playing NewSong's Christmas Shoes all the damn time. Check out the lyrics and... I know what they were going for, but tell me this is not the most awful, horrible Christmas song you've ever heard. It's like, imagine the alternate ending to It's A Wonderful Life where Mister Potter boils George Bailey alive and feeds his soup to the rest of Pottersville, and then try to think of that deleted scene from A Christmas Story where Santa's helpers molest Ralphie with the Red Ryder BB gun he was hoping for, and this Christmas Shoes song is about a thousand times worse. It's the heartburning story of a poor little boy on Christmas Eve who wants to buy a pair shoes for his sick mom so she, and I fucking quote, "will look beautiful if Mama meets Jesus tonight."

Have a super-subtle Christmas, kids!

Really, how do you top that? Maybe some songs like "Satan Just Ate Santa Claus" or "That Tickle-Me-Elmo is Your Ticket to Hell, You Greedy Shit."