The case for a “just me” holiday.

A recent article, “The Case For The Just Us Holiday,” by someone on the child horror website, “Scary Mommy,” recently suggested it may be less stressful to stop seeing your extended family this holiday and instead, just skip those gatherings.
 
The Intergalactic Business Report takes that line of thinking a step further and gives you the ultimate guide to how you should spend your Christmas (and every other holiday for that matter). The secret? Just say fuck you to everyone in your family and walk alone through life, leaving all that stress behind.
 
Below we outline a seven-step plan for total happiness. Follow, and don’t spit—swallow.
 
 
STEP ONE: Identify your extended family so that you can shun them all. 
Write down a list of everyone you’re related to outside your immediate family. This includes aunts, uncles, cousins, and even friends you say are “like family” or your “brother” or “sister” when you’re drunk. If you have a family tree or genealogical charts of any kind, just whip those out too. Add in postcards, Christmas cards, and wedding invitations you’ve received throughout the years.
 
STEP TWO: Stare with dead eyes at the list and charts in front of you. We suggest you put all the information about your extended family on a table in front of you. Gaze at it. Then silently mouth the words, “Fuck you all.” Say it again and again, till you are screaming it. Take all the paper, put it in a bathtub and burn it with a cool lighter, if available. 
 
STEP THREE: Practice pretending you don’t know people you’ve known all your life. This is one of the harder feats because you may run into your extended family, receive texts or phone calls, or even have them stop by your home. Our advice here is to pretend they are all college magazine salespeople bothering you during dinner or a massively satisfying masturbation session you’re having while listening to the Scorpions. 
 
STEP FOUR: Create a new backstory for yourself in which you had the power to give birth to yourself, suckled on your own teat, and learned to read, write, and do math by just thinking a lot. 
 
STEP FIVE: Now that you’ve excommunicated your extended family, start on your immediate one. Let’s face it, most of the stress you have in your life doesn’t come from spending Thanksgiving with your drunk uncle and worthless cousins. Your children and spouse are the ones who really grind you down. Babies crying, your wife asking for shit all the time… And the fucking dog? Do you really need any of this?
 
STEP SIX: Prepare yourself for a totally stress-free holiday.
Just leave your home, and find a hotel room or a lonely apartment, preferably in another state. Now you can do what you’re supposed to do on Christmas—just sit there and consider how nobody on the planet means anything except for you. 
 
STEP SEVEN: Die without all the encumbrances of human relationships. 
When you reach the time where you are so old that you have maybe a minute left on Earth before you pass away into death’s eternal grip, you can smile and think back to all the times you spent stress-free, without having stressful human connections with other human beings. You can think for a moment about the afterlife and who you may see there, and then just laugh when you realize you won’t see anyone, not even your stupid dog! Now you can get ready for a stress-free, with a capital S, eternity!