Workouts and diets during Holidays.

Added: 11/16/2006

Diet and exercise are four letter words in most households during the holidays. Holidays are a time of joy and mirth, a time of relaxation and family, a time of turkey and gravy and football games and dressing and, ooh, that sausage stuffing dressing with the fresh wild sage. The last thing Holidays are for this time of year, is dieting, discipline, and exercise.

Workouts and diets don’t belong in the Holiday conundrum. You never say, We wish You a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a diet and some exercise, it don’t happen. Winter Holidays, really all Holidays are made for food. From hot dogs and hamburgers at 4th of July picnics to turkey and gravy and cranberry garbage you only eat one time a year. Holidays are derived from the Latin term Holida, or to holiday, a verb meaning eat yourself silly and sit in front of the television playing with your belly button watching meaningless football until its your time for thirds. The Greeks were quite an advanced people. A steady regime of workouts and diets make no sense at Christmastime. They are not in the Christmas spirit of getting fat, getting gifts, and moving slowly in an effort not to work. They are evil institutions often enforced after the first week of January by angry spouses. Diet and exercises kill people with malicious intent. Pumping blood too fast when the heart is full of tryptophan is just not healthy.

Frankly workouts and diets haunt me from about Halloween on. Workouts and diets are those things I promise I’ll do if God gets me that bitchin’ stereo for Christmas right after I finish the Christmas cookies. After I drink all the eggnog I can get my hands on I think I figure out why winter is so long. It’s dark before you get up, it’s dark when you come home, it’s dark when you go to bed, it’s dark when you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, it’s DARK, DARK, DARK. You’re full at every stop from the candy people give you from Halloween on, the closer you get to Christmas the more the food sticks to your ribs. Its turkey and ham and roast beef and everybody happens to be a pastry chef. Everybody tries to get you drunk all the time.

Winter is lethargic. You are always drugged by something, turkey and giblets, champagne, fireplaces, presents. Winter lures you into an unease with this cold cool fall air but in reality it is gas heat and oil heat and television feasts and all of this joy and brotherhood and goodwill that makes you feel COZY and warm and content and happy and it staggers your normally cynical view of the world. It’s like walking into Disney World and hearing those stupid little voices that tell you it’s a small world in seventeen languages you don’t understand. What’s the point? It’s hard enough figuring out the language you were taught. If it’s English it seems to change all of the time, but that’s a different topic for a different time.

Winter is certainly blanketed by everything from obesity and lairs of clothing to tryptophan and warm cookies that slow down the blood system, it’s almost impossible to not get bogged down in holiday cheer, the quagmire that drowns us all for a few months. The last thing that you want to think about come the hangover that the world calls February (ain’t no wonder Mardi Gras comes when it does, it’s a hangover helper) is exercise, and the diet that you have corrupted. That needs to be saved for Spring when it’s too late to trim down to get into that swimsuit you forgot about.

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