My Misuse Of Christmas

By Roger Bendis


You can call me crazy, or even obsessive-compulsive, but I have always been a collector of things. When I was a kid, I collected pogs. If you don't know what those are, don't ask...but just know that I had some awesome slammers. My urge to collect things escalated and took years to come down when I discovered the joy of Christmas shirts. There were literally thousands of different designs on the Internet, and I would never be able to own all of them. They were the perfect collectable.

When I get an idea in my head like this, I really take the ball and run with it. Not only to I try to get a touchdown, but I run that ball right out of the park like a modern day Forrest Gump. I felt like the whole college scene was way too dominated by what people wore and how they looked. I wanted to prove that you could wear something completely lame and still manage to have friends and dates. Before I knew it, I had around 15 of these Christmas t-shirts with Santas and snow and all kinds of ridiculous crap.

All of my weirdness paid off for me, though. One night I ended up in a long conversation with this extremely good looking girl who made my heart slam against my ribcage. I'm not talking about the kind of attraction that leads to a bedroom for a night and then a lifetime of awkward glances at the bar. I'm talking about love. This girl was smart, provocative, and sly. She was a challenge, and I loved that we spent the whole night fencing with our words. My stupid Christmas shirts never even came up in the conversation.

Things seemed to progress really quickly at this point. We spent more and more time together, became a charming couple that everyone liked, and then eventually moved into an apartment together. I had planned on staying single until I was out of college, but that plan didn't even matter any longer. All that mattered were my classes and my girlfriend. I knew I was hopelessly in love with her when I noticed her looking through my laundry and shaking her head disapprovingly and immediately hated all of those shirts. I didn't even have to ask her what was bothering her.

She was totally right, of course. The silly hobby had gone on so long I had lost sight of why I was even doing it in the first place. I had almost a hundred of these shirts and they were all extremely inappropriate for anything other than looking stupid at the bar. With only a touch of sadness in my heart, I donated all of the Christmas tees I owned to a local homeless shelter and left that part of my life behind me forever. People were actually shocked when I started showing up to social events in regular clothes, but the quips died away after a very brief time.

We fast-forward to a few months later, and the Holidays were upon us. My girlfriend is a great person and upon her suggestion, we decided to donate our time to serving the homeless on Christmas Eve. Without really thinking about it too much, we went to the same shelter that I donated my shirts to. When we arrived, we were both floored by what we saw. Almost a hundred men and women were there wearing the Christmas t-shirts I had given months earlier. It was festive and just seemed somehow...right. We walked to the serving line and I realized tears were in my eyes. I finally knew what all of that Christmas crap was really for.




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