An Existential Pug makes a Christmas List

The Blonde Woman plops beside me as I’m napping on the couch and begins scratching my head—which I appreciate— then she starts cleaning between the folds on my flattened face—which I don’t[1].

“What would you like for Christmas, Buster?” she asks me in a grating, high-pitched voice that humans use when speaking to infants.

By the way, if one were to convert the number of years I’ve been alive into human years, they’d discover that I am rapidly rounding a corner toward a midlife crisis. But age is just another human construct, a vast abstraction with no real meaning.

But to answer The Blonde Woman’s question—What I would like to receive on this hollow, spurious and materialistic celebration of the birth of mankind’s imaginary friend’s only son?—I would like Cheese, please.

And peace on Earth. But if world peace can’t be procured, I’ll take Cheese of any kind, but I have a penchant for Brie and Sharp Cheddar.

Still, I can’t quite wrap my shriveled little pug-head around the crux of this celebration and the absurd traditions tethered to it.

For starters, the holiday is held in reverence of a historical figure who has limited factual information available. For example, the date of Jesus Christ’s birth is celebrated on December 25, but this is a token marker, the Church’s attempt at that time to usurp the public’s attention away from the pagan festivals honoring the winter solstice. However, most scholars believe Jesus Christ was likely born either in mid-to-late September or early-Spring.

Additionally, for the holiday to have any meaning whatsoever, we must work off the premise of a single God, a Prime Mover, a Cosmic Puppeteer, and even my diminutive pug brain knows that possessing faith in anything unproven—and incapable of being verified—is a leap of logic.

So why not worship Cheese as the supreme force of goodness? And instead of celebrating Christmas, we might celebrate Cheese Day on December 25. It’s every bit as logical.

We can also write and perform songs about Cheese—”Have Yourself a Merry Little Cheese Day” or “White Cheese Day” or “All I Want for Cheese Day is Cheese”—and create cutesy little mythologies about a corpulent man who travels the world leaving cheese trays in the homes of people who adhere to society’s moral codes of conduct.

If humans are looking for a contrived reason to treat each other with kindness and compassion for a few weeks out of the year, then using Gouda or Feta as a reason works just as well as the idea of a virgin giving birth. They are both equally absurd.

And no one would declare a “war” on Cheese Day, or take offense to the use of the term. Cheese is decisively nonsecular, and only the lactose-intolerant could possibly find objection.

So there’s my answer, Blonde Woman. I want cheese, copious amounts of cheese, so much cheese that it will be impossible for me to consume all of that cheese in a lifetime. Then I’ll take a few days to recover before I flip the page and celebrate the flipping of an arbitrary Gregorian calendar.

In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be napping underneath The Cheese Tree.

__________

[1]  On occasion, I run out of column topics so I allow my pug Buster to take a turn at the keyboard. He writes under the moniker “An Existential Pug” and hopes to pen his own column someday.