About a week ago, I was indulging in a late-night scroll on TikTok when I came across one of the most disturbing, disgusting videos I've ever encountered on the app. A mom took a sinus relief syringe, stuck it up her screaming, swaddled five-year-old's nose, and without a moment's hesitation, let the saline loose. I watched a waterfall of yellow mucus pour out of the kid's nostril like lava running down Mount Vesuvius. Then, I watched her de-mucus his second nostril. She added the song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" to the video and captioned it, "It's that time of year again...we're flushing it all out."
As someone who used to suffer from monthly sinus infections (I don't send Christmas cards except to my ENT <3), I felt for the kid and salute the mother. So, on Christmas Eve, as we wrap up Jezebel's 12 Days of Fuck This, I will declare that, as the mom's caption and song choice joked, the most wonderful time of the year is rarely that because everybody’s fucking sick.
This might be the most tired, uncreative complaint about Christmas, but I've been congested for three weeks so I don't care. If you weren't sick after Thanksgiving, then you were sick two weeks ago, and if you weren't sick two weeks ago, then you're sick right now, and if you're not sick right now, then you will be after spending Christmas Day with your cousin's five-year-old and seven-year-old kids. Children have so many obscure and disgusting germs, I still can't believe there wasn't a study into whether covid orginated in them.
And I don't think this is specific to our post-pandemic world. Now, there's just another thing you could be sick with. One of the top five sickest times in my life was when I caught the flu the day before Christmas Eve in 2015, despite getting the flu shot. I slept through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the train ride back to New York because I couldn't call in sick during the holiday schedule and this was pre-being able to work remote. I had a sinus infection in 2017, 2018, and last year—which was maybe the second sinus infection I've had since getting my sinuses fixed in 2019 (shoutout again to my perfect ENT<3) and it came on after I hung out with my friend's kids.
I’ll also make it clear that I’m not currently sick enough to opt out of anything. It’s just persistent congestion that clears up with a little Mucinex. But if the Mucinex starts to wear off in the middle of a conversation, I get that feeling where the mucus slides down the back of my throat, and then I start choking a little bit—so I have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and hack up a ball of slime. You know what I’m talking about. It’s disgusting, sure, but doesn’t warrant staying home in bed.
I suspect this burden is largely specific to New York or New England, or, obviously, just anywhere that's stuck with a cold Christmas. I'd propose the Northern Hemisphere move Christmas to June or August, since it’d be nice to have one more summer holiday, but we're still in a culture war over changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day, and I don’t feel like giving the Christian nationalists one more thing to cry about. I’d move to Australia, but they have huntsman spiders, and I’d move to Florida or Texas, but they have Republicans. What’s a sad, sniffly Christmas gal to do?!
For now, I think I'll take one more tiny shot of Mucinex and then make use of my cold-medicine haze to ask my extended family if they'd show up in court to support me if I were on trial for shooting a healthcare CEO. Merry Christmas Eve! ????
Are you also sick right now? Wallow with me in the comments.
And if you haven’t been following along:
3 Places Roasted Chestnuts Don’t Belong
4 Christmas Villians I Need to Talk Shit With
5 Ways Christmas Is Turning Your Kid Into a Willing Subject of the Surveillance State
6 Christmas Billboards That Should Be Burned
7 Celeb Christmas Movie Cameos That Hallmark Got Wrong
8 Reasons Christmas Markets Must End
9 Songs That Make Me Want to Die
Give Me 10 More Violent Christmas Spy Thrillers
