While this final week of working retail in the Christmas shopping season was a triumph of efficient execution by me and my co-workers, it still has me wrung out. I’ve begun my mornings with migraines almost every day this week, including today. So, instead of one coherent piece, here’s a bunch of random thoughts.

• To get a sense of what it feels like to work retail during the Christmas shopping season, it’s very much like this Jonathon Coulton song but with fewer robots.

• If you’re worried that last week’s apocalypse didn’t happen, don’t worry there’s another one predicted for May 19 of next year, although it’s just a rescheduling of one that didn’t happen last year. See last week’s blog and click the link in the body of the text for more info.

• With the way we bring attention to prophesied apocalypses, I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually becomes a rotating holiday where we look forward to celebrating the end of the world. It would involve mostly dancing, partying, telling the people you love that you love them, indulging all the things that make us feel good about being alive, and feeling happy to have, yet again, avoided ultimate destruction.

• But the thing that most people forgot about on Friday was that it wasn’t just the end of the Mayan calendar, but it was also Winter Solstice. It was the darkest day of the year. The pagans celebrated this day because  the days wouldn’t get any darker and the sun would now slowly return to us.  It’s widely believed early Christians co-opted the pagan celebrations around this time to commemorate the birth of Jesus. Whether it’s Solstice, Christmas, or failed Apocalypse, the celebration is about being happy that we’re still here.

• Christmas film & special recommendations: Scrooge, a movie musical version of A Christmas Carol with Albert Finney as Scrooge and Alec Guinness as Marley’s ghost. It’s my favorite version of the story on screen. It has some wonderfully dark moments, some of which are intensely cynical, including Scrooge’s song “I Hate People”, and a scene of Scrooge in Hell being fitted with his chains.

• For TV, you can’t miss with A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Both still hold up after decades.

• Highly recommended Christmas Double feature: two classics directed by Bob Clark: A Christmas Story and Black Christmas. One is about the holiday season affects the deranged thoughts of a bitter soul and the other’s about a serial killer. Sort of a joke. People who haven’t seen Christmas Story in a while think it’s sentimental nostalgia, but, really, it’s anti-nostalgia. It’s about looking at all the crappy stuff that happened to you as a kid and laughing about it.

Next year, I’m going to see if I can convince my friends and family to not buy gifts for each otherand, instead, take the money we would have spent on gifts and give it to charity. There are people in the world who need help more than we need presents.