i can has sacrilege?

Not sure how it is, that I can get through fifty-odd Christmasses with their trappings and customs, when suddenly something will just go Boiiiingg! and I'll think, "I. Cannot. Stand. That."

Not anymore. Not this year. Not ever again.

It hit me the other day in our town's biggest gift store. This shop has great stuff if you want festive linens and platters and folk-arty salt-and-pepper shakers and hand-blown glass ornaments shaped like fruit and that sort of thing. But I got wandering amongst the Nativity scene displays and noticed how many of them feature big-eyed mindless-looking children or goofy animals or any number of permutations and combinations on sickly-sweet kyewt.

Like this one here

(Courtesy of It Came Upon a Midnight Weird's "Cavalcade of Bad Nativities")

And it's like my eyes were opened. I just wanted to yell, "NO!! Enough! Don't you know what you're making a sentimental farce of there? Do you realize who it is you have the temerity to represent in that ridiculous, minimizing, idolatrous way? It's the eternal holy Creator God of the Whole Freaking Universe who's allowed Himself to go through the mess and pain and hassle of human birth and human life and human death! That's Almighty God there in that manger, not a blinking teddy bear! And no, He's not come to bring sweetness and perpetual kyoot, He's here because we human beings made such an infernal muck of the world He gave us and now He has to come in person and straighten our gosh-awful disgusting mess out by Himself!"

The birth of our Lord is beautiful. It's awesome. It's overwhelming. It's stupendous. It's humbling.

But it bloody well isn't kyewt.