Christmas 2025 was another great one, spent overindulging in both food and drink with family (with one conspicuous absence).  Meteorologically, it may have been the best Christmas in Fecal Creek history.  Holy shit!  Truly violent storms on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day…biblical thunder and lightning, lashing winds, multiple inches of rain, extensive flooding…it was beautiful.

But today, the goddamn sun is out, dear reader…the skies are clear.  And there’s nothing left to talk about except the Day After.  The Great Hangover.  That weird, gray, interdimensional fart of a day squashed between the forced cheer of Christmas and the looming dread of New Year’s Eve.  I speak, of course, about December 26th, a day, according to my calendar, some of our more, shall we say, monarchically-inclined cousins across the pond have apparently christened “Boxing Day.”  I know this only because it pops up every year on my calendar with a parenthetical “UK” next to it, as if I’m supposed to know what it is and how to celebrate it.

I’ve traditionally ignored it, but this year, I’ve decided it was high time I figure this horseshit out.

I started with this fact: nobody in America knows what the hell Boxing Day is.  Not really.  Not in any way that would survive even the gentlest cross-examination by a bored customs agent or a half-sober pub historian.  At best we treat it like some cryptic British ritual involving foxes, tweed, and the ghost of Queen Victoria handing out coupons for discounted marmalade.  And yet – every December 26th – there it is on the calendar, staring at us like a smug, overfed cat.  Boxing Day.  A holiday that sounds, for my money, like a mid-tier UFC event sponsored by a failing energy drink.

Which is what I was hoping for as I began to dissect this calendric pustule.  Because taken at face value, the name itself suggests some sort of officially sanctioned, post-yuletide pugilism, which I could absolutely get behind.  A national holiday dedicated to settling familial scores that had been building up all year.  Maybe it involves bare-knuckle brawls in a parking lot behind a pub.  Or at least some quality fisticuffs after Uncle Tommy starts whining and bitching like some old lady about Republicans over the turkey carcass.  That would be the shit.  Uncle Randy made another crack about your “creative” career path?  Fine.  To the ring.  Grandma Mildred weaponized her disapproval with a strategically gifted bathroom scale?  Lace up, Mildred, it’s time for the main event when you get your dentures knocked out of your octogenarian skull.  Hell yes.  A glorious, kingdom-wide festival of fights, with the King himself officiating from a gilded ringside seat, perhaps nodding sagely as a cousin gets a well-deserved right hook for snatching the last pig-in-a-blanket.

Yes, this I could get behind.  This has a certain raw, cathartic honesty to it.  It’s a vision of beautiful, state-sponsored chaos.

But no.  A quick and deeply disappointing dive into the digital muck reveals a truth far more mundane, more depressingly…British.  The theories are as limp as thirty-day-old tinsel.  One story claims it’s the day the landed gentry, their bellies swollen with swan and their hearts filled with microscopic drops of noblesse oblige, would box up their leftovers and gift them to the downstairs staff.  Here you go, Jeeves.  Enjoy this gnawed-on drumstick and a half-eaten terrine.  A spectacular display of generosity that I’m sure made up for a year of serfdom.

Another, equally soul-crushing theory suggests it’s about alms boxes in churches being opened and distributed to the poor.  Which, again, has a certain Dickensian charm if you’re into institutionalized pity.  But it lacks the unadulterated madness the name promises.

The modern reality, of course, is a monster of a different stripe entirely.  It’s a day of rabid, foam-mouthed consumerism.  A retail-driven bloodbath where otherwise sane people trample each other for 40% off a 73-inch television they don’t need.  It’s the Black Friday of the Commonwealth, a second, even more pathetic lap in the unending marathon of buying shit. We’ve just finished a holiday centered on the ritual of giving and receiving objects, and now, not even a full 24 hours later, we’re back in the trenches, wrestling a stranger for a discounted Nespresso machine.

It seems to be a holiday that feels like a symptom of a deeper sickness.  A cultural glitch.  An excuse to either A) do absolutely nothing, melting into the sofa like a forgotten cheese sculpture, watching sports and picking at the desiccated carcass of the Christmas feast, or B) participate in a full-scale assault on the local shopping mall.  There is no middle ground.  There is only sloth or savagery.

No.  This will not do.  I say we reclaim this hollowed-out husk of a holiday and give it some real American spirit.  Let’s create our own “American Boxing Day,” where the name isn’t just some quaint, dusty relic of classist charity.  No, our Boxing Day would be a glorious, nationwide catharsis.  The “Boxing” would be a mere vestigial nod to tradition, as we’d embrace all forms of glorious combat to settle our post-holiday grievances.  Did your brother-in-law burn the roast?  Settle it with a round of arm-wrestling.  Neighbor’s inflatable snowman still blinking obnoxiously?  Challenge him to a duel, swords or pistols, his choice.  From organized jousting tournaments in suburban cul-de-sacs and martial arts showdowns in public parks to the satisfying finality of a disagreement resolved with Mac-10s, this would be a day for clearing the air.  It’s the American way: turning a confusing and stupid foreign custom into a spectacular, heavily-armed festival of personal expression.

N.P.: “Body Burn” – Cubinate

Merry Christmas, dear reader!

N.P.: “The Twelve Days of Christmas” – Gary Hoey

Here we are, dear reader…Christmas Eve 2025.  All is quiet on the West Coast…almost boringly so.  I was bitching about being bored at a bar today when I was reminded of the Eggnog Riot of 1826 and I thought, “Hot damn!  That’s right.  This is something my dear reader needs to be reminded of.”  So let’s get to it.

It was Christmas Eve, 1826, and the United States Military Academy at West Point was sitting on a powder keg of repressed adolescent testosterone and enforced sobriety.  The administration, in a fit of puritanical buzz-killing pique, had declared the campus dry.  No booze.  Nary a drop.  Which, if you know anything about military history or just human nature in general, is sort of like trying to stop a tidal wave with a sternly worded memo and a napkin.  You are essentially begging the universe for catastrophe.

Which, of course, is precisely what they got.

The cadets – one of whom was a young Jefferson Davis, who would later go on to make some arguably poor career choices involving secession, decided that a Christmas without spirit(s) was unconstitutional.  Or at least un-American.  So, they did what any self-respecting group of future leaders would do: they pooled their resources, bribed a sympathetic enlisted man (bless his mercenary heart), and smuggled in gallons of whiskey.  Gallons.  Enough rotgut to pickle a horse.

This illicit nectar was destined for the holiday eggnog.  Of course, eggnog is a polarizing beverage at the best of times – a sludge of dairy and regret that sits in your stomach like a concrete block – but when spiked with contraband whiskey by a bunch of sexually frustrated cadets in wool uniforms, it becomes a revolutionary accelerant.

The evening started quietly enough, presumably with some light caroling and the surreptitious passing of cups.  But as the ethanol hit the bloodstream, the shit hit the fan, and the decorum disintegrated faster than a cheap tent in a hurricane.  By the witching hour, North Barracks had transformed into a scene from a Bosch painting, if Bosch had been really into muskets and drunken singing.

The logistical grandeur of the chaos is staggering to contemplate.  This was about 70 cadets – roughly a third of the student body – getting absolutely, catastrophically shithoused.  Far beyond tipsy, they were operating on a plane of existence where gravity was a suggestion and authority was a hilarious abstract concept.  Around here, we refer to people in this state as Alconauts.

When the officers (the poor, beleaguered “tactical officers” whose job it was to maintain order) tried to intervene, things went sideways.  Captain Hitchcock, a man who probably just wanted to go to bed, burst into a room to find a party raging.  He tried to read the Riot Act.  In response, a cadet tried to shoot him.

Let me repeat that for the folks in the back: a cadet tried to shoot a superior officer over eggnog.  The pistol misfired, or Hitchcock would have been the first casualty of the War on Christmas.

The riot spread.  Windows were smashed – glazing being apparently being the enemy of liberty.  Banisters were torn from staircases.  Furniture becomes airborne.  Muskets – actual functioning muskets – are waved around with the kind of reckless theatricality that suggests both a deep commitment to chaos and a total misunderstanding of firearms safety.  Additional officers attempting to restore order are greeted not with obedience but with slurred threats, drunken philosophy, and the kind of belligerent holiday cheer that makes you wonder whether the entire institution was built on a cursed ley line.

Swords were drawn.  One cadet reportedly tried to duel a superior officer.  Another attempted to lead a breakaway faction of equally hammered comrades in what can only be described as a proto-revolutionary splinter movement.  It was Animal House with bayonets.  At one point, Jefferson Davis, thoroughly pickled, stumbled into a room to warn his comrades that the officers were coming, only to realize the officers were already there.  He shouted, “Put away the grog, boys!” which is 19th-century slang for “Hide the evidence, we are so fucked.”

The “Eggnog Riot,” as it was later dubbed by historians with a flair for the absurd, raged until Christmas morning.  When the sun rose over the Hudson, the barracks looked like they had been shelled.  The hangover was no doubt biblical.  The commandant was apoplectic.  The court-martial that followed was one of the largest in U.S. military history.  Nineteen cadets were expelled, though many, including Davis – managed to wiggle out of serious punishment because they hadn’t actually broken anything important or successfully murdered anyone.  Nonetheless, careers teetered.  And the academy’s reputation is dragged through the snow like a corpse.

And yet, American survives.  Hell, America thrives.  Some of the riot’s participants go on to be  respected officers, engineers, and public servants.  The republic doesn’t crumble because a bunch of 19-year-olds got black-out drunk on weaponized eggnog and tried to overthrow their dorm monitors.

It’s a beautiful, stupid reminder that even the most disciplined institutions are only ever one bad decision and two gallons of whiskey away from total anarchy.  And I kind of respect the commitment.  If you’re going to ruin your military career, you might as well do it while defending your right to get wasted on spiced milk punch.

So raise a glass – preferably one not spiked with enough whiskey to trigger a congressional inquiry – and toast the cadets of 1826, who gave us the greatest holiday riot on U.S. military history.

And if I don’t see you tomorrow, have a very merry Christmas.

N.P.: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” – Gary Hoey

Alright, dear reader, I suppose it’s time to officially switch into Christmas gear for a couple of days, so here we go:

As my young and historically benighted reader might not know, Christmas in the 19th century was a very different thing than what we have now.  No Santa, no reindeer, none of that horseshit.  What changed?

It’s December 22, 1823.  The world is a grimy, pre-industrial smudge-pot of coal dust and dreadful hygiene.  Christmas, to the extent that it’s even a thing, is a muddled affair of stern religious observance mixed with a bit of wassailing-adjacent public drunkenness.  The idea of a jolly, fat man delivering toys is about as plausible as a steam-powered unicorn.  St. Nicholas is still some gaunt, vaguely terrifying Turkish ghost bishop, not a cookie-addled home invader with a branding deal.

Then, some ink-stained wretch at the Troy Sentinel in upstate New York, likely fueled by bad whiskey and the bleakness of a Tuesday, decided to run a poem.  Anonymously.  Because of course.  You don’t sign your name to something so patently deranged.  It was less poetry and more hallucinatory fever dream printed on newsprint, a piece of pure, uncut narrative insanity that would, against all odds, hijack an entire holiday.

As one who has always cherished and aspired to the societal role of writer as cultural terrorist, I say with certainty that “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is the single most effective piece of cultural propaganda ever deployed.  Before this poem dropped, our conception of Santa was a chaotic mess.  But after?  Bam.  Instant fat-guy-in-a-red-suit consensus.  This anonymous screed built the character of Santan from the ground up, bolt by bloody bolt.  It dictated the whole damn scene: the sleigh, the eight tiny named reindeer.  Before this, did anyone think to call a flying ungulate “Vixen”?  No.  It’s genius.  It’s the kind of specific, world-building detail that worms its way into the collective brainstem and just stays.

The poem itself is a masterclass in lexical precision, sort of a high-velocity descriptive barrage.  The narrator, roused from a “long winter’s nap,” witnesses a whole psychotropic tableau unfold on his lawn.  It goes beyond a “jolly old elf.”  The text insists on a near-forensic level of detail.  The twinkle in his eye, the dimples, the cherry nose, the beard “as white as the snow.”  And the stump of a pipe held tight in his teeth, the smoke encircling his head “like a wreath.”  He’s not described as a saint but a hard-living, possibly Dutch, magical trucker with a serious tobacco habit and a bottomless sack of contraband.  He is a “right jolly old elf,” a creature of pure, unadulterated joy who laughs with a belly that shakes “like a bowlful of jelly.”

This portly specter doesn’t just arrive; he comes in “with a bound.”  He works fast, a blur of fur and soot, filling stockings with a twitch of his wrist, a creature of pure, libidinal efficiency.  He’s like Seal Team Six.  He’s all business.  No small talk, no bullshit.  Just a quick nod, a finger laid aside his nose, and then – poof – up the chimney like a bat out of hell.  The closing lines, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night,” aren’t a gentle blessing; they’re a mic drop.  A declaration of a new world order delivered from the seat of a flying sleigh, disappearing into the cold, indifferent sky.

The poem is a Trojan horse of holiday mythmaking.  You read it thinking you’re getting a cozy fireside ditty, but what you’re actually getting is a full-scale cultural operating system update.  The whole thing is engineered – whether consciously or not – to be repeated, recited, reprinted, and ritualized until it becomes indistinguishable from the holiday itself.

And we certainly complied.

We recited it in classrooms with the same solemnity usually reserved for national anthems.  We printed in on greeting cards, stitched it onto pillows, slapped it onto department-store displays.  We let it take over our Decembers until the poem wasn’t a poem anymore – it was the blueprint for an entire season of sanctioned madness.

For decades, the authorship was a literary mystery.  Clement Clarke Moore, a stuffy academic, eventually claimed it, but the family of a Dutch-descended dude named Henry Livingston Jr. screamed bloody murder, insisting their guy wrote it.  Personally, I think authorship is a very big deal, but most seem to think the mystery is an essential part of the power of the poem.  They argue the point isn’t the author, but rather the blast radius.  This anonymous poem, slipped into a provincial newspaper, became the foundational text for the modern commercial-religious-industrial complex we call Christmas.  It’s one of the most reprinted poems in the language, not because it’s high art, but because it’s a perfect machine.  It did its job with such terrifying competence that we’re all still living inside its weird, sugary, reindeer-powered world, more than 200 years later.  You can’t escape it.  It’s in the air.  It’s in the goddamn malls.  It’s the ghost in the machine.  And it all started on a Tuesday, with a little bit of anonymous ink.

N.P.: “Forsaken” – Adam Hurst