Ebenezer You
🎵There’s nothing in nature that freezes your heart like forgetting what that Guardian article said. 🎵
DECEMBER
This month, you’ll embark on your annual December tradition of viewing The Muppet Christmas Carol in theaters. Despite your pathological disrespect (you always call it The Muppet’s Christmas Carol), this is your favorite Christmas movie. Due to your unpleasant personality, you assume that anyone who disagrees with you probably hasn’t seen this movie and wants to watch it with you right away, or else has a heart of stone. What could be more true to the Christmas spirit than forcing your beliefs onto the world around you?
Sorry to make your favorite winter tradition an example of Christian colonialism Virgo, but perhaps once you’re armed with my astral warnings you can course correct and allow others to, perhaps, favor It’s A Wonderful Life (respectable) or A Christmas Story (ugh) or even The Family Stone (you always think you like this movie but then you watch it and have almost no fun).
As you watch your treasured Muppet Christmas Carol this month, inhaling whatever signature fried cauliflower dish this establishment lays claim, your mind will wander from the film (it’s definitely a film) to the existential. You’ll wonder: in the contemporary world, what does it mean to be a Scrooge?
At first this question seems easy, glossaries of unpleasant character traits will come to your mind. But Scrooge isn’t a generic kind of asshole, he’s specifically an enemy of Christmas. Someone who tries to dismantle celebration or tradition into dismissable pieces, without taking the time to appreciate the strength these silly details can have when they’re all together.
After brief (brief!!!) deliberation, you realize: the Scrooge is you. You will bristle at such an accusation initially, but Virgo I insist you remember that you are the one laying this charge at your own feet.
According to a conclusion you’ll jump to after having a lot more sugar than you’re used to, your behavior towards Christmas isn’t so dissimilar to Scrooge’s famous Yuletide Vendetta.
Perhaps you remember when your best friend innocently asked you if you planned to get a Christmas tree this year, and you spent the next several minutes comparing and contrasting (with heavy emotional commentary) the environmental issues with every single type of Christmas tree available. Despite strong feelings in these categories, you rarely back up your grim claims with facts. You usually preface your nonsense by saying The Guardian had an article about…. and then kind of freefall with the flimsiest possible command of the data.
You know how people say a memory isn’t a memory of an event, but a memory of the last time you remembered the memory, making memories unreliable a la Brian Williams? Well when you read an article Virgo, you come away with a specifics-free summary of the piece, then you create a memory of that summary, then you summarize that memory, then have a memory of that new summary, then your fresh summary so too becomes a new memory, and the emotionally charged game of personally anguished telephone so continues until you find yourself in a conversation you feel you must dampen with poorly remembered “facts.”
Christmas trees aren’t the only thorn in your side, Ebenezer. You’re critical about the non-recyclable status of most wrapping paper, concerned about the manufacturing practices of the decorations you see piled high at the dollar store, and are, as always, dubious of any meat-based holiday meals.
Though you and Scrooge have differing factors driving you to cast aspersions on traditions that bring millions joy, the results skew the same. That’s right, at this very moment your nephew Fred and his wife Clara are playing a guessing game in which you get savagely roasted and labeled an “unwanted creature.” Even worse, the game doesn’t even seem fun!
Though you don’t wish for the fate foretold to Scrooge by the ghost of Christmas future, there is one element that doesn’t seem so bad to you. If you had a will, the only detail you’d have ironed out is that all the women you love (and even a few strangers as long as they are kind and fashionable) must enjoy a day of divvying up your wardrobe and complimenting your personal style, which isn’t deeply unlike what happens in this scene:
Yes, like Scrooge, your dreams for your legacy are highly material. (You have a recent but burning belief that viewing materialism as morally bad is a tool used to pressure people into starting families, a belief which at its core is rather anti-Christmas, since Christmas probably wouldn’t have existed if Mary had been focused on building an impressive vintage nightgown collection instead of incubating God’s little baby.)1
It won’t take you long to go from reflecting on what about you most resembles Scrooge to justifying the worldview you both share. For you Virgo, self reflection is always a game of hot potato. You’ll play, but you’ll pass it along as soon as physically possible.
As the credits of your favorite Christmas movie roll, you’ll shake off your agreements with the evil version of Scrooge and try to implement key changes in your personality to better emulate his evolved self.
You’ll vow to be less critical of the details of the holiday season and attempt the revolutionary: to enjoy yourself.
You’ll buy a Christmas tree, then lights (whose manufacturing practices remain a mystery to you), then more lights, because you have no spatial reasoning and keep underestimating the girth of your Christmas tree, ornaments that are too inexpensive to be ethically made, and ribbon to adorn the presents you wrapped in recyclable paper (End of Movie Scrooge seems open to happy mediums). You resist following the script too closely, and hold back from demanding a stranger go to the store to purchase a big turkey for you.
And because of the changes you make, Christmas will be a perfect day for you and all those on Earth. Just kidding. On Christmas morning, a woman driving a family van will cut you off in a crosswalk then stop in the middle of an avenue to flip you off. Her windows will be down so you’ll have plenty of time to exchange looks with the car’s passenger, a young person wearing a red and green outfit and clutching a tiny dog (also festively dressed).
Perhaps comparing yourself to the worst version of a familiar character isn’t the best way to orchestrate self improvement, Virgo. And can we even consider what you did to be self improvement? From my hammock in the heavens, I don’t necessarily see what’s so bad about being someone who tries to vote with their dollar. But that doesn’t mean you need to be a butthead and rain on everyone else’s parade.
Unfortunately, your Grand Experiment will force you to learn that the joy you feel from having a pretty glowy tree in your house eclipses the guilt you feel about the environmental details you remember a summary of remembering a summary of. So do whatever mental backflips you need to do to justify cutting one of those bad boys down once a year Virgo, and maybe back off a little when you see someone else preparing to backflip in their personal self justifications too.
You recently found out that Mary Magdalene and Mary mother of God are two different people! Why does Christianity have two main characters with the same name??? Anna Karenina ass religion!!!
I was today years old when I found that out about Mary Magdalene lol