Christmas Eve

Happy Christmas Eve! Or, you know, happy whatever holiday you may take pleasure in, on, or near today. A lot of people frown on others who prefer to be recognized for their esoteric tastes in denomination, but not me. If you celebrated Christmas Eve today, that's great (so did I) and I sincerely hope you had a good one of those. If you celebrated Gothic Romance Day yesterday, good for you (so did I) and I hope you felt bitterly and poetically estranged from your true love on some lonesome windswept moor. I suspect that a vast percentage of my viewing audience are celebrating Christmas Eve today while there were only two (including me) who celebrated Gothic Romance Day yesterday. There are, of course, other holidays filling-in the interstices between these extremes (like Chanukah, Alban Heruin, Yule, Festivus, Bangladeshi Victory Day, and the Birthday of the Louisiana Purchase); but here at Update Stuff we only know just enough to cover the following poles--the most- and least-popular holidays of this festive season, respectively. Christmas Eve: invented at least a thousand years ago, by ideological invaders, as the day before a heady concoction of ancient seasonal rites and the modern moral guidance; and Gothic Romance Day: invented about eleven years ago, by me, as a distillate of romantic love and B-horror monsters at the exact midpoint between Halloween and Valentine's Day on the 23rd of December. Christmas Eve is an important free-trade-theology holy day where children beg and moan to get their hands on at least one stuffed stocking before being forced to spend a sleepless night trapped alone in bed waiting for the following day. Gothic Romance Day is pretty much the same, only with a Betelgeuse-ian twang and then the very next day is only Christmas Eve, anyway. [Cavin]