The gonzo lesson of that Christmas is this: the consumerist hallucination is dead. It died in a Target parking lot in 2020 and we spent two years trying to resuscitate it. The joy of 2022 wasn't in the flawless execution of the tradition; it was in the glorious, spectacular failure of it. It was in the burnt cookies and the political argument that fizzled out because everyone was too tired to fight. It was in the acceptance that “ho ho ho” is often just a defense mechanism against the abyss.
My own gonzo Christmas began, as all bad ideas do, with a promise to keep things “low-key.” Low-key, in the post-2020 lexicon, is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid admitting we’ve forgotten how to be joyful. By December 23rd, I was standing in a parking lot at 9 PM, the icy rain turning the asphalt into a mirror of my own haggard face. I was looking for a specific toy—a fluorescent, screaming dinosaur that my nephew would likely forget by New Year’s Eve. The store was out. The clerk, a teenager with the dead eyes of a combat medic, shrugged. “Amazon says Tuesday,” he mumbled. gonzo xmas 2022
Christmas morning arrived not with angels singing, but with the sound of a malfunctioning space heater and the smell of burnt coffee. The family gathered. We performed the rituals: the ripping of foil, the exclamations over socks, the passive-aggressive glances at the uncle who drank the good bourbon before noon. The fluorescent dinosaur was a success—a five-minute dopamine blast followed by a meltdown when the batteries died. The gonzo lesson of that Christmas is this:
Tuesday. Christmas was Sunday.
So, as the sun sets on that memory, I raise a glass of leftover eggnog—which is mostly bourbon—to the Gonzo Christmas. To the year we finally realized that sanity had gone on vacation and we were left to run the asylum. It was loud, it was expensive, it was deeply, profoundly unhinged. But it was ours. And in the fear and the loathing, we were, for a fleeting moment, actually alive. It was in the burnt cookies and the
Hunter S. Thompson taught us that the only way to capture a deranged reality is to become a part of it. You do not report the fear and loathing; you inject it into your morning coffee. And Christmas 2022 was a prime specimen of national psychosis. The world was limping out of a three-year pandemic that had redefined “isolation.” The economy was a Rube Goldberg machine of inflation and interest rates. War raged in Ukraine, poisoning the energy grids of Europe. And yet, in the shopping malls of middle America, a grotesque pantomime was being performed: the desperate, sweaty insistence that everything was fine .