It’s official: Today is the hottest December 24 on the United States’ east coast on record, a fitting end to the hottest year on record. Take a look at that map: It looks like the molten inside of a Hot Pocket everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. Those alarmingly red colors represent temperatures 18 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than what we’d normally expect for the day. So how do we enjoy this day usually reserved for hot chocolate and building snowmen golems via magic durags? Here are exactly 11 suggestions.
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Wonder why media outlets keep calling December 24 Christmas Eve. I mean seriously, right? We’re like three years into the War on Christmas and this thing still holds. I think we should push for “Festivus Hangover Day,” or “I Can’t Believe I’m At Work Making Lists Day.”
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Go tanning: OK. So I don’t really do the whole “tanning” thing for semi-obvious reasons, but sunlight is good for us. Really good for us. We need Vitamin D for some very important things, like absorption of critical vitamins and development of bone density to avoid rickets, and the only way to do that is to get direct sunlight when the sun is over 45 degrees in the sky. Rickets sucks, by the way. Many people also need the sun for preservation of mental health. With terrible weather and with the ozone increasing in the winter, lots of folks don’t get enough of what they need. So now’s the time to go outside!
- Play football
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Hide your football concussions by drinking a lot of eggnog: Concussion symptoms look and feel a lot like hangovers! Pro-tip! And you can’t let all that seasonal goodness go to waste. Good spiced rums work really well with store-brought eggnogs, and you can capitalize on the good weather by trying your hand at eggnog/daiquiri fusions. Yum!
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Turn your ugly sweaters into ugly tank tops: Because side-man-boob is totally in.
- Read more of this list below
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(The lists here won’t let me start after a page break with number 7). Buy a gun! The holidays are the most popular time to buy instruments expressly designed to kill other people. Because nothing says “Jesus” like the hot barrel of an assault rifle.
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Skip the gingerbread house and make a chocolate chip cookie house instead: Gingerbread is decent, but I think everyone agrees that chocolate chip cookies are at least 10 times better. So why keep with the cold-weather tradition of making gross hand-sweat stained houses with gingerbread when you can make gross hand-sweat stained houses with chocolate chip cookies? Noms.
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Read up on Kwanzaa: Unity, Self-Determination, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics, Purpose, Creativity, Faith. These are kind of decent things for any family to celebrate, right? Kwanzaa was created as black culture struggled with the role that Christianity played in both its oppression and ideas of salvation. It has evolved over the years from a sort of quixotic attempt to a black revolutionary statement. Check it out. You’re not busy shoveling your driveway or anything right now, so why not? Start here.
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Weep about how climate change is going to destroy us all: Seriously. We’re all going to die from floods or famines or plagues. But the way things work, generally the global poor and people of color are going to die first, so the odds are favorable for most people reading this to at least make it past the opening credits of the sci-fi movie about it.
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There were only 10 things on the list.
Enjoy!