Happy Holidays! [2012]

[Adrian2040]

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays and yadayadayada! See ya on the Catastrophe's Anniversary!

[Dashe]

Thanks. We had a load of flurries last night but it turned into rain by about 10PM. Ah well, close enough for government work, eh?

I got a pretty decent haul this year. Coffee and a lot of socks, mostly. I run through pairs of socks like nobody's business. Every time I walk on a hardwood floor in socks I have to slide about and that wears them out faster.

I also got Xenoblade Chronicles and the new Golden Sun and Epic Mickey 2. And a compound bow that was fitted to an eight-year-old and needs to be exchanged. My dad tried to show me that surprises can sometimes be awesome, but he neglected to consider that if something needs to be fitted, it probably shouldn't be purchased without the person around. Sorry dad, your life lesson of the year backfired! Surprise!

Other items of note include a bottle of Rain-X, a calculator watch, a Grammar Police pen, the Amelie DVD, and a large box of watercolors. Someone clearly wanted to prep me for Secret Santa 2013. :22:

Happy Holidays to all and to all a good...uh...day! Late afternoon for some of you!

[Mikéy]

I guess Adrian beat me. I was totally ready to go all MLT with the thread [minus the monologue] this year too, but I had to bolt last night, since I knew people were going to want me up early to open presents. :17:

Ah well. This year, I got an iPod Touch, $100 from my grandpa, $35 from my older brother, a $75 gift card to Gamestop from dad, 2 awesome Kingdom Hearts shirts, the stocking full of candy, and some movies/games:

• Transformers [Film]
  
• Megamind [Film]
  
• Sonic Unleashed [Wii]
  
• Sonic and the Black Knight [Wii]
  
• Kung Fu Panda 1 & 2 [Films]
  

and, that's about it. Not a bad haul on my end either. Merry Christmas again.

Also Adrian, Ima add the date to the thread title. Mmmkay? Mmmkay.

[ravenf6]

Last night was one of the better nights I've seen in a while. Had a few friends and family over. We had a good dinner and after a few hours, we got down to the gifts. Of which, I did get the following

-$100
- $20 credit for Walmart/Sam's Club
- a track suit (will probably use it soon, since I've been gaining weight, again)
-wool socks (very good since it's getting cold, lately)
-2 lottery tickets (didn't win anything, but this was expected)

A good start for the loot, I'm looking to augment that, tomorrow. For now, I just finished a big brunch, and am working on a sketch and messing around with my legos. A good holiday, so far.

[Fatman X. Jones]

-WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS DEPRESSING INFORMATION. DO NOT READ IF YOU VALUE YOUR CHRISTMAS CHEER.-

I don't really have much reason to be merry this Christmas.

Not many presents or reason to be happy. And most of the reason behind this melancholia of mine stems from the status of my job and all the work I've put into it this past year. Are you sitting comfortably, my dears? Because I'm about to regale you with the tale of Charles "Fatman" Swanson II, and the Christmasless Christmas he has this year.

It all started sometime around June, when my current place of employment, Servpro of North Whitfield Catoosa & East Walker Counties, was hired by a kindly woman to restore the fire-damaged bunker she and her late husband used as a home after it had caught fire from a freak lightning strike to the hillside it was in. She nearly lost everything, and it was our duty to restore it to her.

My part of the job, as my position of Fire Damage Restoration Technician (part-time) can attest to, was to restore the smoke and soot-covered items she had inside her house. Things like books, movies, her grandchildrens' toys, her dishes; all of it covered in smoke, soot, and pitch. My sister was brought in over his summer vacation to aid me in this task, a task that totaled in items to fill over six-hundred boxes.

Now, the job was harsh and dirty work, work not a lot of people want to do themselves out of many reasons; fear of breaking something, dislike of getting dirty, disdain of having to work for the lower class, but the job is something I do with pride. I consider it penance for my own selfish desires and lack of drive to engage my own college ambitions myself, to work off my bad karma and gain good karma. The pay--around $200-250 on a good week--doesn't hurt, either.

The reason this job was so difficult cannot be attested to the scale of the damage alone. It can also be attested to two other root causes, one of which were the substandard levels of equipment in our production room. A job like this, you expect to have industrial dishwashers, industrial washing machines and dryers, hand vacuums, plenty of industrial cleaners of proprietary nature, and most of all a comfortable, central-air-conditioned workspace.

We had low stock of cleaners, a dinky $400 washing machine, a half-broken dryer, two buckets of constantly ice-cold soapy water, worthless sponges, a kitchen sink and a home dishwasher that couldn't be run due to a broken line or something (the employer never told us). Not only that, it was in the hundreds of degrees in that production room with only one rolling air-conditioner and no air vents.

Another cause of our grief was our employer himself. A big man, and also a very drunk man who would regularly engorge himself on whiskey in the comforts of his office and a general embarassment to us all. He is not known as a smart man, and it gets even worse when he's blitzed as he always is. When you have a fat, slobbering piss-drunk half-brained Carolina man breathing down your neck for four months constantly hounding you on when you're going to finish the job, and giving you shoddy forms to keep record of your completed work, you generally start to want to rebel against your employ in some fashion, especially if combined with the uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, ill-equipped conditions you are given to perform your job.

My sister was in tears when she went back to college, a lucky break for her to escape the job a few months in. I was less than fortunate, having to put up with the bastard and his bastard job until the day I finished. I didn't even get to finish the job in a satisfactory manner, I just finished it haphazardly.

Oh, you may ask yourself, "That's bad, but I don't see what all this has to do with Christmas." It gets worse. Here begins the second half of the tale, starting with the events AFTER I finished my job.

The client was ready to take her items back--she wanted to keep almost all of it out of sentimental reasons, despite almost everything being blackened and nearly unrecoverable--and asked us to do a search for some DirecTV boxes she had to take back to her provider in exchange for new boxes. We found them, after going through every single box in the shop for them, and my employer was there to help. What he saw in his drunken stupor was a bunch of items that weren't clean enough. Even the books--which were pitch black and definitely should have been written off, if not for the client's intervention--had to be wiped down and cleaned again. He said that it would count as double work for us and lose him money.

Out of spite, or drunken idiocy, or probably both, he didn't hold a Christmas party for the company, nor did most of us get the Christmas bonuses we were all depending on for our bills and the like. One of our vital office staff quit as a result of having to be the one to do all the dirty work after my so-called "Rush job" of cleaning, which was only brought on by my employer in his drunken stupor throughout the job. Now the business has a bad chance of going under if we don't get any work, which we've lost a lot of due to losing the office staffer.

As a result of all this, the most I've gotten was $50 from my grandmother, two sets of sweatpants and sweatshirts, and a $15 iTunes giftcard from my brother and my sister-in-law. I'm going to have to wait for anything else until after the New Year's rung in.

I don't really have much reason to be merry this Christmas.

So if any of you dare to be Grinches this year, here's your Aesop of the season:

NO ONE CAN OUT-GRINCH FATMAN X. JONES. HE IS SIMPLY THE GRINCHIEST THERE IS.

Merry friggin' Christmas.

[Mikéy]

D'aw. You have my condolences, Fatman. I suppose not everybody can be Merry during the holiday, and sometimes one can't help being a Grinch. I accept your reasoning and pray that things get better for you. Servpro... I suppose now's not the time for references. :12:

Good luck with the boss. Hopefully he shapes up before he arrogantly undermines the company to extinction .

[Fatman X. Jones]

Oh, I'm not feeling that un-merry, I'm just primarily citing my case as a reason why I COULD be Grinchy this year. I'm providing to the Grinches of the Station my resumé of why I could outGrinch them this year, so they have more of a reason to be merry. It's a cautionary tale.

I'm actually quite happy with what I have, and thankful for my family and friends being so close. If anything, I'm tapping into the true spirit of Christmas: being together with the family and friends I care about, and not material things like money or gifts. A deconstruction/reconstruction of the idea if there ever was one.

[Mikéy]

Haha, good on you then, Fatman. That'll show 'em.

[Nightshade]

Nothing much to say about my holidays beside the fact that I'm off work until the 2nd. I'm spending the week at dad's place. Not much in the gift department, but I do have a new desk in my room which was very nice. Other than that, I received some free games from work and another from a friend.

Happy Holidays and here's hoping things will go well for you all in the next year.

[SketchMan3]

Not a particularly memorable Christmas, but I can't complain.

[Pitch]

I've got no real reason to complain about the holidays this year (_{SPOILER;Especially not compared to Finalhaz—err... FatMan over there.}), but I dunno. I'm just not feeling the spirit this year. We've got relatives over and more relatives coming who we don't get to see any other time of year pretty much. (And who I used to see all day every day, way back when.) So that's great. We've had pretty nice family get-togethers on both sides of the family. And that was cool. But it's come and gone and it didn't really feel like any special day or anything, just like just about every other holiday this year didn't (for me, anyway). I have no idea why; it's been a pretty OK year. I dunno what's wrong with me. :21:

But I won't spend more than a paragraph on that non-sense.. So, here's my haul this year:

• A winter coat
• 2 zippered sweatshirts
• A t-shirt
• A bike light
• An electric shaver

My parents asked if there were any video games I wanted, but I couldn't think of anything, so this is what I wound up with. I'm not complaining, but it's certainly dull. I would've asked for a 3DS game or something, but there weren't any must-have titles out this season, which was kind of surprising. (_{SPOILER;Probably because all anyone cares about these days is WiiU}.)

Happy holidays, everyone!

[Bean]

My family and I had a pretty great Christmas. I hope you all had the same or at least have a good time leading up to a Happy New Year!

[Kyle]

I had a pretty awesome Christmas. Chiz and I spent the wee hours of the morning (on my side of the globe, at least) "bonding" over a playthrough of SQIII. At 6:40AM, my little brother woke me up to go down to the living room. I ended up with the usual loot:

• Far Cry 3 (Cleared by now)
  
• Dishonored (Cleared by now)
  
• Fair chunk of money (Still residing in my wallet)
  
• Set of pajamas! Hell yeah!
  
• New clothes
  

That's about it, really. I won't bore anybody with the events of the day.

[TronBonne]

My Christmas was spent with family as usual, it was very nice. We opened presents in the morning, then went to my cousin's house for dinner in the evening, where we played Jenga for....a long time, while Christmas movies played in the background. We had way too much fun with that game!

I received:

• Pokemon Calendar for 2013
  
• Pokemon Black/White 2 Soundtrack + Pokemon HeartGold Soundtrack
  
• The Legend of Zelda Series for Piano: Piano solos
  
• Super fluffy pajama tops
  
• A new purse

My favourite gift was actually from the secret Santa exchange we did at my part-time job.

• 2 packs of Pokemon Cards
  
• Lip balm pack
  
• 4 huge tic tac containers
  
• A mini Japanese phrasebook/dictionary
  
• Chocolate
  
• And another gift that didn't arrive in time, but they'll give it to me later

I was so surprised and touched at the thought put into the gift!

[Chaotic Chao]

Christmas was really fun this year. I can't believe it snowed during Christmas where I live. Why? Because I live in Texas. And it snowed. Only on Christmas Day. That's right, it snowed in a normally snow-free state and it ONLY snowed on Christmas Day. Unbelievable. Anyway, the gifts I got were...well, everything on my Christmas list, actually.

• XBOX 360
  
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2
  
• Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed
  
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams
  
• Shinobi 3DS
  

I feel kinda guilty though that I got the most gifts out of everyone in my mutual family. But as long as everyone else got what they wanted too, I suppose.