Happy Buffer Day

So! Anyone else groggy today?
 

If you’re not, then you didn’t do Thanksgiving the right way. See, back when the Native Americans kept the pilgrims’ tummies from a-rumblin’ through a booger-freezing winter, they did so with a very clear goal: Allow the white settlers to survive so they could kill off the indigenous tribes, take all their land, and commemorate the feast each year by drinking too much and yelling obscenities at the Lions’ offensive line.
 

Or maybe not. I’m a little fuzzy on anything pre-Revolution.
 

Regardless, the mark of a successful Thanksgiving is a mild hangover, and a stomach so ravaged by gluttony that it would gladly kill you if it possessed opposable thumbs and a large bludgeoning implement. Beer, food, then more beer will do that to a digestive system. It makes for a sloth-like Friday, but the fuzzy, disjointed memories will last a lifetime. Or at least until your memory is drowned completely by gas-station wine and cheap schnapps.
 

Only that’s not the only thing contributing to my grogginess and general malaise. It’s the ads, man; the ho-ho-hoing, ring-ting-tingling Christmas ads that are blasting us about the eyes and ears like an indiscriminate boxer with lead pipes in his gloves. One more hip-hoppin’ Santa wearing too-loud earbuds and scrolling through a smartphone, and it’s off to the woods so I can kick a reindeer in the gonads.
 

Relax, I’m an animal lover. I’ll take my shoe off.
 

The Christmas assault is too much, too soon. I need time to process one holiday before moving on to the next; it’s common courtesy, one that’s long been ignored by the holiday gods in favor of driving profit margins and filling malls. This is an oft-uttered complaint, of course, expressed by anyone with a disdain for Black Friday (or Black Thursday!) sales that herd consumers to checkout lines while the pecan pie is still being digested. Except here I offer an honest-to-goodness solution.
 

Buffer Day. Think about it for a second.
 

On Buffer Day, all activities cease. Everyone gets the day off to recuperate from Thanksgiving – even journalists, who get away with not covering news because there’s a national one-day moratorium on anything important happening. All talk of Christmas is legally punishable by a new torture technique called waterboarding-by-eggnog. Malls are closed. Would-be holiday revelers are prohibited from turning on their multi-colored porch lights; transgressors are locked in a cell for 24 hours and forced to paint Easter eggs while watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” on a continuous loop. (This happens on a Saturday, of course, because Friday is Buffer Day and all the jailers have the day off.) Christmas ads are stricken from the airwaves. Anyone caught whistling “Jingle Bells” or “Frosty the Snowman” is stuffed in a giant stocking and not released until Christmas morning. Santa Claus is sequestered in a bunker at an undisclosed location with cookies, milk, and back issues of “Popular Mechanics” until the following sunrise.
 

Buffer Day celebrations include lying in bed, sitting on the couch, scratching one’s self, and farting.
 

I’m not trying to be all bah-humbug or anything. Really. I love Christmas just as much as the next guy. I just need a day – one day – to get my bearings. To not think about mistletoe or gift wrap or sugar plums. Is that too much to ask?
 

Judging from the Black Friday lines, it is.
 

People just can’t wait to get a jump on “the season,” an appellation so ominous it deserves its own quote marks. And what’s crazy is that these people aren’t even children. You’d think kids would be the most eager to leap into the holidays, what with the overabundance of colors and glue sticks and anthropomorphic animals. Nope. Those people waiting in line at two in the morning to save fifteen bucks on a rice cooker are all grown-ups, and they’ve decided that Christmas is going to be a five-week marathon, just enough time to suck the Yuletide season dry: No carol left unplayed, no special left unwatched, no pie left uneaten. Typically I’m all for unabashed overindulgence, but coming hot on the heels of belt-tightening cobblers and can-shaped cranberry jelly, it’s all a bit overboard. It’s like birthday parties. I like birthday parties. Birthday parties are fun. But if I had to go to a birthday party every single day in December, my already-tenuous sanity would collapse and I’d start painting mustaches on everyone. Really ugly handlebar mustaches. Even on babies. Especially on babies.
 

Think about what early-onset Christmas fever does to the younger set. Time is relative, and to a child, a single day represents a greater percentage of their life than for us older ducks. While the holiday head-start likely has roots in the warm fuzzies people feel for the season, it turns youngsters’ inevitable Christmas anticipation into an unbearable eternity, stretching these weeks into an oasis of waiting and hoping. I know ’cause I’ve been there. Late in my childhood, when Santa’s flying abilities were just beginning to arouse my skepticism – right around the time I started shaving – the holiday season would begin as soon as the last slice of turkey disappeared from our plates. Dad whipped out the seasonal beer, Mom tossed Bing Crosby on the stereo, and I began my neverending wait. It was agony. Coming so quickly after Thanksgiving, I had no time to mentally prepare for the long slog to Christmas, which, though pleasant, felt less like time spent and more like time suspended.
 

One day. Buffer Day. That’s all I ask.
 

Then the malls can reopen and people can trample their neighbors to get first crack at an iPad or Blu-Ray player; trees can be decorated and lit, and mistletoe hung over doorways, waiting for Yuletide’s first kiss. I’ll be right there celebrating with the rest of y’all.
 

But today? Today I finish work and succumb to the lingering pull of a residual turkey coma. What a glorious time-out it’ll be. That, my friends, is what Buffer Day is all about.