Note: Read to the bottom to find out how to get your non-xmas present.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine asked me

If you were a woman, who would you be?

It’s a question I had never really thought about and that’s what I told my friend. But now I realize exactly who I would be. Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times. Last week she wrote this:

Jingle Bell Schlock
By MAUREEN DOWD

If I hear “Frosty the Snowman” one more time, I’ll rip his frozen face off.

It’s a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of “Ring, Christmas Bells” drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates.

I’ve never said this out loud before, but I can’t stand Christmas.

Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can’t fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year.

“You’re weird,” my mom says. This from a woman who once left up our Christmas tree until April 3, and who listens to a radio station that plays carols 24/7 all month.

My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house. There’s a mouse Santa Claus and mouse Mrs. Claus and mice elves and a miniature Christmas village with mice, and some rat Cinderella coachmen in pink waistcoats and rats in red velvet vests and more rats, wearing frilly red-and-white nightshirts and nightcaps and holding little candles, leading you up the steps to bed. It’s beyond creepy. I keep fretting that it’s going to be like “Willard” meets “The Nutcracker,” where they come alive and eat her like a Christmas pudding.

My mom and sister both blissfully sat through “It’s a Wonderful Life” again on Thanksgiving weekend, while even hearing a mere snatch of that movie makes me want to scarf down a fistful of antidepressants – and join all the other women in America who are on a holiday high – except our family doctor is a Scrooge about designer drugs, leaving me to self-medicate as Clarence gets his wings with extra brandy in the eggnog.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why others’ season of joy is my season of doom – besides the obvious fact that yuppies have drenched the holidays in ever more absurd levels of consumerism.

I think it has to do with how stressed out my mom and sister would get on Christmas Day when I was little. I remember them snapping at me; they seemed tense because of all the aprons to be sashed and potatoes to be mashed. (In our traditional Irish household, women slaved and men were waited on.)

It might be exacerbated by the stress I feel when I think of all the money I’ve spent on lavishing boyfriends with presents over the years, guys who are now living with other women who are enjoying my lovingly picked out presents which I’m no doubt still paying for in credit card interest charges.

I was embracing my Christmas black dog the other day when I read a Times article so scary it made my hair – and my genes – curl.

It was about how severe stress can make a woman age very rapidly and prematurely, looking years older than her chronological age, because the stress causes the DNA in our cells to shrink, and sort of curl down on itself, until the cells can no longer replicate. “When people are under stress they look haggard, it’s like they age before your eyes, and here’s something going on at a molecular level” that reflects that impression, said one of the researchers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California at San Francisco.

So now, on top of all the stress related to having a president and vice president who scared us to death about terrorists to get re-elected, I have to be stressed about the fact that my holiday stress might cause me to turn into an old bat – instantly, just like it happened in Grimm’s fairy tales, when a girl would be cursed and suddenly become a crone. Or just like this Christmas doll my sister brought home once that had an apple for a head; her face looked all juicy and white at the start of the week and then by the end of the week, it was all discolored and puckered.

I flipped through the hot new self-help book by Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist from Columbia, Md., “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now.”

One of them is the cardinal rule of anxiety: Avoidance makes it worse; confrontation gradually improves it.

Yep. I definitely need to rip Frosty’s face off.

I too hate Christmas. Can’t stand it. I’m sure there’s some Freudian childhood reason for the angst it stirs up in me, but even more obvious than that, why in the hell would I want to celebrate a holiday founded on Christianity and consumerism? Maybe I’m a grinch, but I am not a Christian and I can’t stand consumerism. I hate shopping in general, but shopping for the sake of shopping … that’s demented. Navidad stirs up so much panic in me that I’ve successfully managed to not be in this country and to almost always be alone every single Christmas since 1997. I have some happy memories of all those December 25ths and maybe one day I’ll write about them. But I’m not gonna be able to run away in solitude every Christmas for the rest of my life. Dowd’s right: avoiding anxiety does make it worse and it’s time I confronted Christmas. So this year not only will I be here in San Diego, but I’ll be spending the day with my family.

Still, I sure as hell am not going to be buying any gifts and I really really really don’t want anyone giving me any gifts. In fact, not giving me a Christmas gift would be the greatest gift you could possibly give me.

With that said, let me make it clear that I’m no Jehova’s witness … the year is almost over and it’s time for me to start putting together the third annual Oso’s Catalog of Pop – a collection of the music I most enjoyed over this past year and stories about why each song means something to me. This year I’m going to once again burn CDs and make a cover to the jewel case, but I’m also gonna make the album available online via a zip file you can download. If you’d like the actual physical CD though and your address has changed since I sent out last year’s batch or if I don’t have your address, please email me with it. This isn’t a crap xmas gift. It’s an un-xmas gift. It’s me sharing the second most important thing in my life (music) with the first (friends).

By the way, if you like Maureen Dowd’s style, I highly recommend checking out the blog, Legally Bored, written by a classmate of Abogado’s.