I got myself a gift, but I don't celebrate christmas and Chanukah is fake, so I guess I really just "bought something." I've been meaning to get it anyway. So how's that for some Grinch-itude?

In case you didn't know, I'm Jewish. And I'm not really all that practicing, but y'know, that's what I am, and I'm jewish enough to say "yeah, I'm Jewish".

Calling Chanukah "Fake", got me made fun of a little. I believe I was misunderstood:

It's not that the entire holiday is imaginary, or even entirely insignificant. It's just that it's not fucking Christmas for crying out loud, and the attempt to pretend it is by making it a day of gift-giving and all that other bullshit is, undeniably, fake as hell.

Now, that being said, winning battles and not getting entirely killed despite a whole lot of shit getting busted up by some ancient multi-sylabic Greek fuckers and then some arguable mythos about burning fluids is really great and all, and I'll even except that it happened before this little Christ whipersnapper showed up on the scene with his fancy magic show and energy efficient wine-production skills, hence, y'know that whole OLD testament nickname. But somehow I put the Birth of an entire religion's Mesiah over Winning a Battle and Scrubbing up a defiled temple. It's not a big religous holiday, it just happens to be around the same time as a very big one on the other side of the fence.

Christmas as a corporate/American entity, I agree, is pretty goddamn fake, but no more fake than Chanukah's external construct is.
In fact, the fakeness of Christmas openly invites us to celebrate it and enjoy it despite our blatant non-belief in it's supposed religious background. And we do, goddammit. Why else would I be drinking two Gingerbread fucking lattes a week now, and putting "Happy Holidays!" at the end of the occasional business email at the office.

Which is not to say we don't equally offer up people to enjoy our public holiday horseshit as if it were an American passtime, it's just that your average person sees a shiny, sparkling, candy-covered tree inside your house paired up with a fatass jolly grandpa in fuzzy red pajamas and his magical flying woodland creatures a little more exciting than spinning a small wooden cube and going "Yay! they didn't kill us and we get to clean up the Temple and this candle we lit while we were doing it is still buring after EIGHT fucking DAYS, man!"

-But yeah, Latkes kick ass, maybe we can start weening the kids off the eggnog and Bing Crosby with some of those fucking delicious oily potato-treats.
Dave