Don't Lose Your Marbles New Years Eve

New Years Eve is supposed to be a celebration of a new beginning. For me it has become a celebration of an end. It is the official end of the holiday season.

I am not a holiday humbugger. I just believe that the season has been excessively prolonged for commercial reasons. Retailers try to get the jump on us earlier each year as they bombard us with products. The holiday season starts with the Christmas catalogs and TV ads that arrive around the Fourth of July. Before I stop swatting mosquitoes off of my backside, my home is cluttered with pamphlets, flyers and books with wintery scenes depicting the wondrous holiday season.

As I stated I am not a humbugging, holiday miser. I just believe that we are unwilling guinea pigs in a premature, meticulous, mind molding battle for our pre-holiday dollars.

The stores know what will happen. We will buy our gifts early. That is their plan. Their plan also includes the calculated risk that our gifts will be found by snooping kids. They also know that a better “upgraded” gift will be introduced before Christmas and it will make our already purchased gift seem cheap. They also know that we will forget that we have already purchased gifts for loved ones and, by getting instilled with the holiday spirit, buy them more gifts.

We are being mentally tortured by Target. We are being water boarded by Wal-Mart.

As soon as the advertising arrives the season begins. It’s only natural. How can you stop kids from getting excited when they see Santa arrive in the same ad as they see their back to school supplies? And, when the season starts…it cannot be stopped. That is the problem.

Here we go again. The kids start talking toys. The planning talks begin for the celebrations. When locations have been chosen, events are planned. Travel is discussed. The menu and dietary requirements are posted on Facebook. Menu responsibilities are dispensed. Budgets and expenses are exchanged in clandestine locations. Gift lists are developed and secretly distributed inside crescent rolls during planning sessions disguised as family social events. The people to be held accountable for the “trouble element” of the invitees are carefully assigned their watch duties.

Eventually, sometime around Veterans Day, the family tires of all the arguing and someone attempts a coup d'état to overthrow the family.  This person becomes the Holiday Nazi. Everyone welcomes the leader.

This year the Holiday Nazi is doing a wonderful job. But, once again, the toll of the prolonged season has driven me to fear a repeat of the tension that drove me to insanity last year. Last year I got sick of my own family. By New Years Eve I wanted to roll a grenade into my house and make relatives fly out of the fiery windows as I gleefully watched from behind the yard shrubberies.

It was the organized board game marathon that got to me. I hate them.

Somewhere in the middle of Trivial Pursuit my frustration peaked, I am usually very good at this game. My mind is filled with useless information. I think it comes from hours of staring at TV, reading magazines and listening to talk radio. I know that my college education did not provide any useful knowledge.

The game was going badly. For some reason, I was getting all of the difficult questions. While the family morons were getting questions about cartoon characters, I was getting questions about quantum physics. While I was struggling to determine the number of electrons on a Kryptonite atom, my cousin, who failed the test to be a greeter at Wal-Mart, answered a softball tossed question and won the game.

As he searched his brain to answer, “Who is the star of the Andy Griffith Show?” I snapped. Maybe it was my pride. I think it was the building pressure of the six-month long holiday season. I took the board and threw it across the family room. I stood defiantly and yelled. “Guess how far I can throw the damn board?”

I am calm now. This year has been easier. But I am entering the family get-together with precaution and preparedness.

I have heard rumors that the kids are planning a Hungry Hungry Hippo contest. I will not lose. I am ready. I have had extra marbles sewn into the lining of my clothes since St. Patrick’s Day.

Happy Holdays…and don’t lose your marbles.