For as long as I can remember, I've never really enjoyed the holidays. There have been good moments and there is always good food. However, the season fills me with unease: family chaos, the annual climax of mass consumerism, financial stress, and the bastardization of beliefs I used to hold sacred.
On Tuesday after work I wandered into a shopping center. I was early for a date with a friend and needed to kill some time. It should have been rush hour, that time between work and home when tired adults and children fresh out of the confines of school gridlock places like grocery stores. I was in a shopping center between Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was almost empty. There was store after store full of bored employees in an imported exhibit of the American mall. There was a Claire's with no tweens and an H&M with no Asians inside. A tractor beam of faint holiday music tugged at me and I realized I was walking towards a Starbucks, of all places. I went in. I don't drink coffee and I especially don't drink Starbucks. I bought the most American, corporate, joke of a coffee in the largest size possible: the holiday mocha toffee latte...with soy milk. And I drank it in. All of it.
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