Monday, March 24, 2008

A Short Word on the Holiday Hangover


I hold this firm believe that the only reason parents can get their kids to believe in God is because God deals in chocolate. Unlike Buddhism and Judaism which preach abstinence and fasting on major holy days, all Christian holidays involve gluttony and brightly-wrapped presents for kids to shred in the living room. In a child's mind, Jesus died for our sins only after he died to give us a day off from school and a new pair of shoes with skates on the bottom.

Enter: Easter. One of the strangest holidays we humans celebrate when you consider it because no one's really sure if we're praising miracles, grave robbers, or zombies. Any which way, we still look like a bunch of crazies because bunnies don't lay eggs and no natural egg I've ever seen has come out looking like the product of a retarded six year old with a Paas dying kit.

I've only been to church a few times in my short life, but most of the times I was forced to frequent were during major holidays, namely Easter. I'd sit in the back row between my grandmother and a six hundred pound motherlard with a bible in one hand and a bag of Popeyes chicken in the other, thinking that things couldn't possibly get any worse. But they would. On these fore-spoken major holidays, the pastor would always find it necessarily cute to wrangle every kid in the parish onto the stage so he could embarrass them for life and do his Bill Cosby impression. The kids would squirm around stage, not one of them standing completely still, and at the end of their personal torment receive a York peppermint patty as consolation for their embarrassment. Watching those kids was like watching the dog races. The second the pastor would stand up straight, get off his knees and back onto the adult level, those kids would bolt like Rusty had a Playstation tied around him. It was incredible, and even the ones almost in their teens who knew better felt the urge to bolt back to their pew.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the catalyst to my theory. Sure, most kids grow up still believing in whatever they were raised on. They still attend church or temple or mosque or whatever once they're twenty-somethings with a crop of kids of their own. But if you were to ask most why they take their kids to church, I guarantee you the astounding answer will be "to give them a better moral foundation." It's not sacrilege. It's modern day America. It's the everyman. Yes, there are real live Christians out there who go to church to pray and repent and not for the free wine and crackers, and to those people, good for you. At least those people know what they believe in, even if it does seem illogical to me. But the rest of America, it seems, is in it for the free swag. The kids like the chocolate. The parents like the Cuisinarts. And everybody in between has been doing it so long that they've forgotten why they do it anyway.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes this religion great. It's like Mardi Gras, only instead of beer and tits we get candy en mass! And really, what could be better?



Happy Easter hangover, ladies & gents.

1 comment:

jesse said...

What could be better?

Real life.