The "Fun" in Dysfunctional

If life were like a Hallmark movie, holidays would be filled with merriment, joy, peace and love. Cookies would always come out of the oven a perfect golden brown, the Christmas tree would smell sweet and never shed its needles and families would gather together to sing songs and hug.

It’s almost enough to make you go all Clark W. Griswold crazy.

Thanks to David Sedaris, however, we can now bask in the glow of a dysfunctional Christmas, a phenomenon he cleverly depicts in one of his earliest collections, Holidays on Ice. This mish-mash of short stories and real-life essays is the perfect antidote to the picture-perfect holiday greeting card Christmas that gets shoved down our throats.

In his typical sarcastic, dry and witty style, Sedaris skewers some of modern society’s best known holiday traditions. In “Seasons Greetings,” he takes the usually self-indulgent and egotistical holiday letter and turns it completely on its head, throwing readers wildly off-course. Meanwhile, the harsh theater critic in “Front Row” blasts the child-like and amateurish Christmas pageant productions put on by local schools. The morally suspect and short-sighted narrator of “Based Upon…” tries in vain to secure the rights to a Christmas story that is sure to capture audiences’ attention because it will be “based upon a true story.” And Christmas giving it taken to a new extreme by the couple in “Christmas Means Giving.”

But the star of the collection has to be Sedaris’ amusingly droll look at life as a Macy’s elf in “The SantaLand Diaries.” Throughout the weeks leading up to Christmas, Sedaris details the various humiliations the Santa Land elves must endure, all while mocking (sometimes silently, sometimes aloud) the masses and masses of Christmas idiots who come to visit Santa Land. Through Sedaris’ eyes, Christmas has never looked so unappealing.

So if you start to get sick of the overwhelmingly saccharine, Hallmark-movie-of-the-week holiday atmosphere, pick up David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice and be grateful that there are still some people in this world more dysfunctional than you.

[Photo Credit: Google Image Search]