Christmas Alone: A Driver’s Manual

Shitmilk. You’ll be spending Christmas alone this year and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Never fear! DMS here to show you the way out of a holiday daze through the time-tested cureall of alcohol. Why suffer the loneliness of an empty celebration when you could suffer the loneliness of an empty celebration GAMEIFIED? We present to you for your fun and displeasure, The Alone on Christmas Drinking Game:

(To this end, we highly recommend picking up one [or several] bottles of Peppermint schnapps, a high-proof German liquor with seasonally appropriate flavoring to complement your Yuletide ennui, but if you can’t find anything like that on Christmas Eve or later, you really can’t go wrong with over-the-counter vodka from your neighborhood 7-11 [somebody does have it worse than you on Christmas]:

)

1 shot each time…

…it’s already dark again by the time you wake up

…you fart loudly and unashamedly in your own living room

…you realize you didn’t send out any Christmas cards

…you wonder what that girl you used to like is doing right now

…you consume breakfast food that does not require heat

…you see a Jewish family while seeing The Force Awakens at the Cineplex (bonus shot if you accidentally wish them “Merry Christmas” SUPER EXTRA BONUS SHOT if you’re actually seeing The Hateful Eight)

…you order a pizza (bonus shot if you eat the entire pizza)

…you masturbate

…you check your Facebook (bonus shot if there are no messages or comments waiting for you)

…you watch a “Best-of” for SNL Christmas skits and think about how the show really down slid after John Lovitz’s departure

…two words: Manheim Steamrollers

…two words: Enya

…you talk to your dog like he’s people (bonus shot if your dog is a cat)

…you think about how you spent Halloween alone, too

…you put on holiday-themed slippers, an “ugly” sweater, a Santa hat, or anything that lights up or has antlers on it

…you feel White Guilt

…you wrap something you bought for yourself

…you unwrap something you bought for yourself

…you listen to music that isn’t Christmas-related

…you look at a card you received from your elderly aunt and it makes you realize you haven’t spoken to her in person in over a year, that you never send her messages or give her any calls, and that you’ve never sent a thank-you card to her

…for every phone call you receive…

…and every one you don’t.

2 shots each time…

…when you realize you didn’t get a tree and it’s definitely too late to buy one

…you actually feel regret for skipping your company Christmas party

…you inadvertently view any of the following on TV while sitting in your underwear: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, A Christmas Story, Christmas Vacation (BONUS SHOT for The Year Without a Santa Claus, and EVEN ANOTHER SHOT for sitting through that freaky Heat Miser/Cold Miser sequence)

…you masturbate

…you play video games (bonus shot if it’s while in your underwear or Christmasy slippers)

…you log onto the Craigslist personals section

…you realize you haven’t left the house in two days

…you do anything related to personal finance

…you eat store-bought Christmas cookies

…you get high. On Christmas.

…you start reading (and finish) a listicle

…you “get caught up on [your] fan fiction”

…you watch anime

…you play Grand Theft Auto, any version

…you masturbate

3 shots each time…

…you “Tweet”

…you visit any of the Chan’s

…you view shop-at-home programming

…you are confronted by a nervous looking middle-aged man for staring into the windows of his house while his family eats dinner

…you masturbate

…you realize that out of many, many instances, this is the only day of the year you actually have an excuse for wearing your bathrobe past noon

…when you realize it’s the holidays, you’re single, and you’re halfway to 30 with no change in sight to way you’re fucking things up now

…you realize that you should have appreciated your parents more when you were around them, and just how much fucking work getting the holidays right for your kids really is, and that you can’t really say how many more years you have left with them

…you realize that it really doesn’t get better after 21. In fact, things just seem to get worse and worse. And you haven’t even started thinking about let alone working on a retirement plan, and you know the longer you weight that less likely it gets to sink into old age comfortably – old age that, just a few years ago seemed so impossibly remote, but now seems terrifyingly close and swiftly approaching that you won’t be able to get out of the way in time

…that weight you promised to work off by the end of summer is not only still on you, but it sat back in the recliner as some of his best friends came to join him. And your hairline certainly isn’t getting any thicker (though it is getting grayer, or whiter – grayer AND whiter). And that you can’t remember the last time you had the will to exercise, or get out and meet people, or where you didn’t feel ridiculous walking past a group of teenage girls (or even boys), and that most of your old friends and even classmates you ignored and looked down upon or even felt contempt for and securely settled in careers with wives, a kid, maybe even two or three, with car loans to make payment on and school district lines to consider and coupons to clip for the tuna fish that goes into the casserole they eat every Monday night while you can’t even heat up a frozen dinner correctly and panic when a younger female relative asks you to hold her baby while she scoops food onto her blue paper plate at the family reunion potluck in the Elk’s Lodge building last summer when you were still recovering from that well-need root canal and talked like a tubercular Mongolian octogenerian interviewed on one of those snooty PBS documentaries about obscure cultures you’ve never heard of before and could have went your whole life without knowing about and got along just fine nonetheless, thank you very much, but you still end up watching because you can’t be buggered to change the channel until you finally muster the willpower necessary to shut the damn TV off, and in the sublime urgency of that first moment of silence that follows you realize that God cannot be found in noise and restlessness, but that God is the friend of silence, and that perhaps a Christmas spent alone is actually the best Christmas of all, because only a Christmas spent in silence can lift your spirit up to the Ultimate Song that can only heard when all the notes of all the instruments and voices are first made quiet by being played altogether at once, as the colors when mixed together in light create a transparency that is at once all colors, and that life is an Illusion and that there is no Death, only endless transformations and repurposing of boundless energy radiating out from the Mind of the Divine, and that the Divine is God, and that God is Love and that there is in the end nothing you can do to resist that Love, and that all souls of all living things, even the tiniest blade of grass or the largest dinosaurian, antediluvian sea monster trudging the frozen depths of farthest seas, that will not be returned to God, which is the Infinite

…you regret playing The Alone on Christmas Drinking Game

…you take a shot