'Yes, Viagra, There is a Santa Claus..."

I got a spam e-mail the other day that asked a simple, but important question:

Joyous neuroses, Culpepper?‏

I don’t know who Culpepper is, but I often suffer from joyous neuroses at this time of the year.

The email was an offer for Viagra, the gift that keeps on giving. But with the way my love life has been going, I have no use for Viagra, unless I need a place to hang candy canes.

Joyous neuroses seems to be spreading as 2008 draws to a close. I noticed that I was the only customer in my local card store on Tuesday afternoon, which is just not normal.

“How’s business?” I asked the owner, hoping he'd have some happy news.

“Not good. There should be 20 people in the store at this time of the day.”

He then delivered a lengthy diatribe about the alleged Ponzi scammer Bernard Madoff and $50 billion scam.

I went to a supermarket to get food for the dinner and the place seemed pretty sparsely populated.

While I was waiting on line at the checkout counter, one of the other cashiers—a young woman with a Santa hat and four metal studs in her face—scolded a delivery boy who had brushed against her.

“Watch the booty!” she snapped.

On Monday, when it was so bloody cold, I walked down the street feeling sorry for myself until I saw a group of Mexican immigrants lined up outside a local coffee shop on Fifth Avenue, waiting for someone to offer them work. I put head my down and kept on walking.

The good news is that we survived our family Christmas dinner, which was the source of some serious joyous neuroses. It felt strange hosting this dinner at our parents’ home and not having them there.

This year’s event was particularly important because it may or may not be the last Christmas dinner we host in our family home.

The original plan after my father died was to sell our parents’ house some time in the spring, but if you’ve been reading the papers, you know what’s going on with the housing market.

But we did have a nice dinner and now in the great holiday tradition, I am overstuffed, overtired, and overdrawn.

I didn’t watch any of the holiday movies this year, since most of them remind me of my mother.

I was briefly tempted to dig up “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” which has some very nice songs, but then I recalled how my mother used to sing one in particular—All Alone in the World—and I thought it was best to leave that video in the cabinet. Maybe next year.

This year I was cursed to hear “Donde Esta Santa Claus?” the Christmas song I loathe the most, four times in just two days. That has to be some kind of human rights violation. Where is Amnesty International when you need it?

If you don’t know this song, I envy you, as it is so atrocious it could drive the Pope to atheism.

The song revolves around some cloying cute bilingual brat who keeps pestering his “mamacita” about Santa Claus’ whereabouts. Whenever I hear this song I want to scream mamacita donde esta barf bag?

The worst moment came on Christmas Eve when the song came on while I was trapped in my sister’s car.

She promptly pumped up the volume and sang along with this nightmare while I calculated how seriously injured I would be if I jumped out of a moving car.

After the dinner, when everyone had gone home and my sister and I were washing a mountain of dishes, we were treated to another Christmas clunker entitled “Dominick the Donkey.”

This song is also quite hideous, but by that time I was so tired I was numb to any kind of pain.

Maybe next year we’ll do another holiday road trip. I’ll just about anywhere, so long as it’s warm and I don’t to hear “Donde Esta Santa Claus?” ever again.