A vague sense of disillusionment has plagued Emily Jinglebell, protagonist of Hallmark Christmas movie, within a month of being notified by her employer at Yule be Sorry LLP, a corporate law firm based in a stock photo of a city skyline in the winter months, that she would have to work on Christmas Eve.
“At that point. I could not articulate how I felt, but after years of being lulled into a sense of security about my position at the helm of this capitalist hierarchy as a successful lawyer, I understood my privilege is a delusion of grandeur,” Emily wrote in an exclusive statement to the Campus Times. “I am nothing but as faceless and forgettable as any other employee — from the jittering businessman, wealthy off his exploitation of labor workers, to the street prostitute, poor and sexually exploited — of this structure. Something, that I’ve noticed since youth but never plainly enough to decree, has become glaringly apparent to me: these industries are inhospitable to the magic of Christmas.”
Last Tuesday, at 3:31 a.m., shortly after Ms. Jinglebell was informed of her obligation to work on Christmas Eve, Jinglebell’s former fiancé, Daniel Albrecht, filed a report to the local police unit that he’d woken up to find his fiancée gone, only having left an explosive note reading, “I fear that something within me has lost its patience, Danny. Despite us both being successful in our careers, you have always reduced me to an element of your fantasy. For all this time, I have only been happy to be told I should be happy in these circumstances of wealth and status; however, the veil, cast over my head, has been ripped off — and with that, my respect for you has morphed into resentment and disgust. How can I respect someone who works on Christmas Eve like a slave? Your submission to your employer is similar to a cat’s way of ingratiating itself through overt displays of affection in exchange for slop, smelling of slimy fish, to be dumped into its empty bowl, crusted with old rotting food bits at the bottom. It is despicable and repulsive, Daniel.
“You must emancipate yourself as I have. Come to realize that these contemporary inheritances of the monetization of human wrath and agony that has cued the development of such a structure are neither accidents nor side effects of this corrupt design we live through: they are the objective. Daniel, we’ve been a performance for a capitalist society: There is a sense of comfort someone has found in our success, because as we toil away in our careers to destroy the environment with our rampant consumerism, our efforts become the vehicle by which the media justifies the poverty of others as a consequence of sheer laziness.
“And, when you die, your employers shall step over your fleshy corpse as they consider what they’ll have for dinner, and the rat-eating impoverished, with eyes like pockets of a pool table and teeth like rotting stubs, forming a wide smile at the foot of your bed, shall — if justice is true — flay off your face and wander the world with a mask of your skin.”
Ms. Jinglebell’s token minority friend, who actually doesn’t have a name, voiced his concern to the Campus Times. “It’s an alarming message,” he said. “She went on a bit of a lengthy tirade about capitalism and even defended several pieces of Marxist propaganda at a dinner party a few days after she let me know she was requested to work on Christmas. But ranting is not completely unusual when it comes to Emily, so I didn’t think too much of it.” At press time, both Jinglebell’s token minority friend and Mr. Albrecht are uncertain of her location.
Fortunately, the Campus Times found that Ms. Jinglebell had relocated to her childhood hometown, where she opened a Christmas-themed bakery, called Home A-Scone, with her childhood best friend, Nicholas Noel. “For the first time, I feel satisfied with the thought of my life,” Ms. Jinglebell, sitting in the newly opened bakery that she had ended her lucrative career for, told a reporter of the Campus Times. “Everything I have ever done was devoid of Christmas: I trudged through pretentious Ivy Leagues, studying the LSAT and interning at stupid companies, like the ACLU, throughout the holidays. Now, because of Christmas, life is so simple. I don’t even know what same-sex marriage is because, thanks to One Million Moms, queer people aren’t an issue in the Hallmark universe: We all know that they can only survive in Christmas-hating and capitalist systems.”
Well, Ms. Jinglebell is back in her hometown. Her money, success, wealthy fiancé, well-established colleagues, and all else in her old life are far away. But she’s here. Concluding her statement to the Campus Times, she wrote, “Though my fingernails still hold the filth of the greedy and corrupt lands I crawled from, nothing could have subdued my Christmas cheer for very long.”
