Your glamorous and intelligent children are rushing home for the holidays in colorful woolens from their universities back East. Everyone is looking forward to spending lots of time singing carols in the original German around the grand piano and arguing about poetry and legal torts around the ol' fir tree. Whole haunches of Angus are dragged out of the garage livestock refrigerator and prime cuts of meat are lovingly prepared. Dad-killed ducks are rendered, hams are fruitily decorated to look like Pucci dartboards. Affluent and witty neighbors troll by impulsively on a sledge to drop off large pies and expensive gifts, expertly wrapped in metallic paper.

Great Grand-Nonny's real silver lies on the table next to the Wedgewood gravy boat and the whimsical party crackers imported from England. Elaborate wreathes of holly and pyracantha surround thick, scented candles above the roaring fireplace, where fragrant pine woods blend with the salivary aromas of burning butter, sugar, pork and clove. There are a few well-behaved and precocious 3- and 4-year-olds who run around irresistibly in little plush footsy-suits and say stunningly hilarious things, their innocent joy palpable and infectious.

Then there's the vast majority of less fortunate people in the world who dread the holidays and spend Xmas lighting cigarettes off the space heater, unshaven in a lousy apartment, wearing the clothes they slept in, having a Blockbuster video day or merely watching the burning Yule Log on TV and drinking until it seems to actually have dialogue.

Holiday cheer is scarce for the lonely, broke and downtrodden. The only reindeer those people are likely to encounter is the one on the front of the Jagermeister bottle. The aggressively cheerful facade of the holiday season holds nothing for the desperate, and tacitly implies that the disheveled sad sack has failed deeply and personally by not creating an idyllic and luxurious family situation for himself, if for no other reason than to host this annual holiday virus.

Many such people are forced to stave off severe seasonal depression and the humiliation of life failure by such jarring stimuli as big death action movies. It is no coincidence that many of the biggest budget, Schwarzenegger-style, shoot 'em in the face films open on Xmas Day. Watching wrathful murders makes depressed people feel strong. They walk home in the cold to their empty apartments, hopped-up on the sexy pump of rage, hoping some asshole will say something obnoxious to them so they can feel justified in kicking the joker until he doesn't move anymore. "Howdya like that, heh?" one can leer as the perp squirms in the gutter. "Merry f---ing Christmas."

This violently escapist conclusion is less painful for both parties than staying home and watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and crying hot, piteous tears for oneself when everything turns out OK at the end. "When will I get my happy ending?" one sobs between chicken nuggets. Not this Xmas.

Those in the lower-to-middle class who suffer suburban holidays endure a whole other variety of torture, primarily in the form of needless family strain. There is an unwritten law (probably espoused by the airline industry) that for the winter holidays, long-distance families -- even those whose members don't really like each other -- must fork over vast sums to travel to be together.

The airlines, writhing flirtily with profit, really go all the way with their holiday spirit and usually show some vomitously cloying, sentimental, Xmas propaganda porn flick with a title like "The Greatest Gift Ever," wherein a high school student willfully undergoes having his kidney removed to save his beloved great aunt, Debbie Reynolds, and concludes with everyone singing "Silent Night" and crying with deep familial joy.

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