For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact, it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the pre-season of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existential point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our Maddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummies’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.