15 Tips To Make This Holiday Season Fun-Part 2

To catch up, read the first post about making this holiday season fun.

6. Pay for professional risque family photos to put on your holiday card. Everyone is going to have a pic of their kid in a red and green Christmas sweater or sitting on Santa. Make yours memorable. Make this year the near-naked Christmas. Your kids will thank you when they look back fondly at their baby album.

7. If you break something at your friend’s holiday house party, for the love of mike, please throw it clandestinely in the trash. It would be selfish to tell Sarah at her own party that you broke the vase of her cat’s cremains trying to steady yourself after four glasses of wine on an empty stomach. It was hardly your fault. Do the humane thing and let her slowly wonder where Pretty Boy’s ashes went over the next few weeks. Don’t ruin the mood tonight. Go get yourself another glass of wine instead. You totally deserve it. I mean, the cat was already dead, for fuck’s sake.

8. Put holiday lights on your house in September, when the weather is nice. It sucks to hang lights when it’s drizzly cold. Then start decorating inside your house each week for twelve weeks prior to Christmas. This stretches the holiday season by like a quarter of a year. How could that ever be a bad thing? Christmas is the season of acquisition. You have a responsibility to retailers to buy as much decoration crap as you can cram in, on and around your house. Thanksgiving is a lame holiday, decoration-wise. It needs to get over the fact that Christmas is everyone’s favorite holiday and let red and green Christmas lights be the symbol for the Quarter. Grow UP, Thanksgiving.

9. Re-gift like it’s 1999. In these economic times, or just because you are a cheap, pretentious bastard, save all the gifts that are clearly below your standards for others to enjoy later. If you accidentally send the chocolate mocha-scented candle Mary gave you for Hanukkah back to Mary for her birthday in May, then so be it. It was her fault in the first place because everyone in the family knows how much you HATE sweet food-scented candles. Re-gifting is an exercise in the survival of the fittest. Only the crappy, “beneath you” unstylish gifts get re-gifted. Think of it as a cool, passive-aggressive way to “re-educate” your family on what you like.

10. Tell everyone you know times are tough for everyone and that the family should not have a gift exchange this year. After everyone agrees and sighs in relief, buy them all a super expensive gift  while telling them you got a well-deserved bonus this year and wanted to share the cheer. There won’t be any hurt feelings. They already know you’re an overcompensating asshole.