Every year at this time, we Splendid editorial types are faced with challenging questions. Do we go all out on a spectacular feature interview for Christmas week, only to see it overlooked by readers who -- quite rightly -- are busy spending time with family, finishing last-minute shopping or desperately trying to gather a group of like-minded friends with whom to defiantly not celebrate the holiday? Do we follow the lead of other online magazines and run a dull, self-important feature in which our writers alternate between being indier-than-thou and praising Radiohead? Or do we just pull some shit out of our collective metaphorical ass and call it a "special holiday feature"?

This year, we decided to be a little different. We decided to ask hundreds of bands to share with us their own tales of Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus, New Year's Eve, Kwaanzaa, the Feast of the Blue Goat and all those other seasonal holidays. We figured we'd get some funny stories, some sad stories, a lot of stuff we couldn't use at all, and a bunch more that would require extensive grammar and punctuation corrections. What we forgot to take into account is the fact that musicians, when asked to share anything other than alcohol, drugs or political views, are often surprisingly reticent -- hence the comparative brevity of this feature.

Out of gratitude to the few kind, giving souls who did respond to our request, we present these holiday stories as our gift to you...without a gift receipt.

Gary Floyd (Black Kali Ma, The Dicks, Sister Double Happiness):
Here's a weird one about Christmas...

In 1992, myself and Sister Double Happiness guitarist Danny were traveling from San Francisco to Texas to spend the Christmas holiday with my sister and her family. The trip was fine until our car broke down just outside a small Texas town -- Durden, Texas, population 366! It was Christmas eve, about 2:00 in the afternoon.

We were outside the car waiting for AAA to come to help us when a police car drove by and looked at us and stopped. We were, of course, a bit nervous, but having no reason to be worried, we greeted the big, serious, red faced cop with a "Merry Christmas". He looked into the car and saw Danny's acoustic guitar laying there.

"You boys musicians?" he asked.

"Huh, yes we are," we both said.

"Well, we've got a problem here in Durden today," he said. "Ol' Miss Hittiebon died the other day and today is her funeral. The Problem is Sara Frommek, the woman who was doing the music at the funeral took sick and can't be there... So I need you to get that guitar and come on with me to the church over there and play a couple of songs. Either that or have Santa visit you in jail this year".

We were freaked out and really had no choice...so we did it. We walked into the church and saw about 30 people there, all sad and looking at us like we were monsters from...well, San Francisco. We played "Wayfaring Stranger" and "Jesus Loves Me" -- believe me, not like a joke, real serious and real slow and sad as we could make it.

As soon as we finished, the police guy looked at us and nodded his head toward the door. We were out of there quick. The AAA truck was waiting and soon we were on our way back to San Francisco, where I called my sister and said, "Sorry, you can come here if you want to, but my trip has been cut short -- by the untimely death of one Miss Hittiebon!"

Boo Rah, aka Dave Nesmith (Rah Bras):
Once upon a time, when I was a young Boo, I used to get up at 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. on the morning of Xmas Day. I would sneak down to the Xmas tree and arrange everyone's presents and shake my own in front of the cat, in hopes that the cat would take offense at having a box shoved in its face and start ripping the wrapping off. In the Court of Xmas, I would be cleared of all charges, since I had not ripped the wrapping myself. But anyhoo, that's not the full story. The person who took the greatest offense at my early morning romps through the presents was my sister. She, being three years older, wanted to oversee any present handling. But unfortunately for her, she had not the capacity to wake up at 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. So one Xmas, she told me a story, which went like this...

Sister: You have to listen to me, Boo, because I don't want you to get hurt...but if you walk down the stairs by yourself on the morning of Xmas, little Baby Jesus gets mad and sends the Christmas cows of the manger to stampede, and they trample you!

From then on, my mind was bombarded with a cacophony of farm animals every time I tried to walk down the stairs in the wee hours of Xmas Day. For the next few years, I would wait at the top of the stairs, trying to see where the Christmas Cows could run from, but eventually I would go wake up my sister and we would walk down the stairs together. I had to admit there were no Christmas Cows when we were together. Perhaps she was right. So one year, as I was pacing at the top of the stairs, I decided to make a run for it. I don't know what bravery came over me but I made a mad dash down the stairs. My feet were hitting the wooden stairs so loudly, that I mistook them for the sounds of stampeding cattle! I started screaming, "THE CHRISTMAS COWS ARE GOING TO GET ME! AAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!"

I made it to the bottom of the stairs safely, but not for long. My father came running out of his room screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"

And I said, "The Christmas Cows almost got me! But it's okay now... It's all okay."

Dave Norwood (Seven Storey, Lonewolf Annex):
Four years ago, I lived and worked in Desert View, a remote tourist stop on the Southeastern rim of the Grand Canyon (my friends referred to it as my rim job). Due to my meager wages ($5.75 + scenery), I had no cash to make it back to family for Christmas, and so I had no other option but to spend the holidays in my crappy trailer.

My friends Sasha and Paul, from Flagstaff, paid me an unannounced visit on the 22nd, lugging two cases of Olympia beer and a bottle of Wild Turkey. Paul also brought dinner -- elk steaks. His younger brother had spotted a fresh roadkill on the side of HWY 89 two days before, and opted to butcher it. It was the first time any of us had ever eaten roadkill, and believe you me, we'd never had an elk so tender! We ate and drank well into the next day. My neighbor, an elderly Navajo rug weaver named Daisy, didn't get a wink of sleep because of us.

We made a little song that night. Add music accordingly:

What's on the menu tonight?
"Roadkill!" the skinny one yells.
Ford-whacked meat is such a treat.
Roadside elk-bull is my gourmet tool.

Roadside buffet, my mainstay...
Oh, so gamey!

Tomato (the Sound of Urchin):
I forget how old I actually was, but I was in junior high, probably 7th grade, like 13. Now, everyone probably has this realization at some point in their life -- maybe on a birthday, or some other special day, or not -- when they find out that their parents want to start treating them as "adults" from now on. This rite of passage had no warning or any big "you're a man now" father/son moment going on for me -- I got gypped because it happened a little too early in my life and I wasn't ready for it at all.

So, Christmas morning comes around and I had asked for some cool stuff, like a video game system (I think it was Colecovision at the time), and a bunch of other cool toy-like 13 year-oldy things. So I made the trip downstairs, the family tradition, to the usual piles of presents, all separated between me and my sisters, and I opened the special present (we'd get one special present and a bunch of little ones) to find...a fuckin' electric razor! One of those three headed vibrating Norelco jobbies!

Now, I don't even think I had any facial hair at all at the time, but I guess my dad was real anxious for me to start shaving or something, or to show me that I was gonna be a man soon. Maybe it was with nice intentions, but I didn't see that. I didn't understand it at all, and never got anything kid-like for any Christmas after that. So, Christmas stopped representing toys and fun things that year for then on, and it started representing shaving, sweaters and playing Colecovision at my cousins' house.

Dave Snow (Blueline Medic):
I'm not really one to make a big thing of New Year's eve. I mean, I'll drink till I'm sick and have a good time, but it doesn't really mark it out as something unique from other nights out with friends. My housemates, however, were not quite the same come the dawn of 2000. For a week or so prior, they pilfered wood to build a large mini-ramp in the back yard, collected vegan treats and stockpiled mock turkey (affectionately called "tofurkey"). One ensured that we got our $500 worth of fireworks bought over the border, while the other bolted locks onto our bedroom doors to make sure everyone stayed out of our things. Furniture was packed away, plastic cutlery was out and our bar was stocked. By about 3:00 p.m., the ramp was finished and we started to have a skate. By 5:00 p.m. people began turning up, so I retreated inside to stash my alcohol in my room before having one last skate. A little sweaty from this last ride before I started drinking, I decided to have a quick shower and spruce myself up a little.

Clean shaven, smelling fresh, I went to my room to change clothes. I didn't, however, get into my room for a good hour or so. The locks Nick had put on worked a treat, but the key was in my room along with all my drinks and my clothes. Putting the old stinky ones back on, I returned to figure how to get in past this deadlock. I tried disassembling the doorframe. I tired picking the lock ever so gently. Frustration pretty quickly took hold. After the first hissy-fit, I tried removing one panel from the door. No luck there, I tried pulling the lock apart completely. This wasn't working, and the parade of "what are you doing"s from everyone who walked into the place wasn't helping either.

By the hour mark I lost it. Taking to the door with the hammer, I smashed that fucker in. Grabbing my drinks, I had another quick shower, skulled half a bottle of vodka, prettied myself up again and got amongst it all. Come midnight there were at least 200 people in my back yard. The drunkest were chasing each other about the yard with fireworks. One girl put a cigarette out with her boobs. I kicked some freaks out of my house for doing coke in the kitchen. Nick got so wasted he did dick-tricks on top of the ramp for about an hour: no one really took much notice. All the furniture was tucked away so nothing other than two bikes got smashed. I saw at least four different people vomit. It all just kept going on and on.

Aside from the ramp and the fireworks and food, nothing much was different. It felt odd to have a party at my own house. It felt even more odd to wake up in the park a few blocks away and spend the next day certain that you're made out of cardboard boxes with lids that just won't close. All in all, it was fun. Nothing great, just fun.

Christy Brigitte Darlington (Darlington):
Back in Christmas season 1999, I took a part time job for $6.50 an hour at Contempo Casuals in Northpark mall. Contempo was a small store which sold girls' clothes and was owned by Wet Seal, so it sold the same crap. Despite the low pay, it was still fun due to a cool holiday in-store soundtrack (I am a sucker for Christmas songs) and the staff of cute girls (and the store manager, who was a club kid homosexual male with a penchant for cocaine and techno), who were very friendly. Except one.

The assistant manager, Brandy, was a complete bitch -- and a Scrooge, to boot. On Christmas Eve, she was training a new assisstant (the store manager was off that night). The rest of us were done with our duties and ready to go.

"No one can leave until I do", she declared. "It's the company policy."

Now, I knew that it wasn't. The rest of the staff was composed of teen girls who were scared of this bitch, but I was older and wiser. I got in her face and told her it wasn't the policy and I had to leave to spend Christmas Eve with family and friends and since my duties were done, there was no reason I should wait around while she trained someone. It was Christmas friggin' Eve, for chrissakes! I told her I was leaving and what could she do to stop me. She said she would write me up. I said, "Then do it, Scrooge!" and walked out, leaving behind an actually fun job (so many cute girls and moms shopped there...) and a gaggle of stunned coworkers. So to keep it short, the bitch wrote me up and fired me -- and not only that, she wrote an extremely bad report that prevented me from ever again being hired by the company. But what goes around comes around, and I heard later on that she was fired for stealing not too long after that! Revenge is sweet, that MTX CD sucked, and she was a bitch Scrooge, but I still had a merry Xmas. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Trent Raygor (Cadillac Blindside):
December 31, 1998 at about 11:00 p.m., I found myself lying on my back on the top of a moving boxcar. With wine bottles in hand, my friend Jay and I coasted along the Mississippi River staring up into space. We chatted lightly about our "Black Christmas", Halley's Comet, and whether or not mental illness is inevitable with age. He thought that it all came down to the amount of hours we spend spinning in this elipse. Those hours made his dad show up drunk for Christmas Eve dinner with what they all suspected to be a prostitute, and made my girlfriend dump me on the day before New Years. I thought that his dad probably just had a drinking problem, and my girlfriend, well, probably just wanted to make out with other guys when the clock struck midnight. While she was doing that, I was freezing my ass off on the top of a moving locomotive bound for Wisconsin -- a social flunkie, lying there, just watching my breath and the stars. We polished off our bottles at midnight and threw them into the trees. As soon as the train slowed we jumped off into the snow drifts. Then we waited for a new train.

Tim Den (Kimone, Transform Booking):
The Christmas / Holiday I remember the most is the one from '88: my first Christmas in the US. I didn't speak a word of English, had just moved from Taiwan to Miami (where my newly-learned Spanish, from living in Ecuador, came in handy), and was about as awe-struck as any immigrant would be at the sight of the Land of Opportunities. The streets were as wide as highways to me, there were cartoons on TV all the time, the teachers didn't kick the crap out of you for speaking out of turn... I thought I was in heaven. Having spent my entire childhood up til that point dreaming about what AMERICA was like... it was surreal to find myself now living in the land of blockbuster movies and MTV. I'll never forget that feeling.

Cruiser:
Note: No individual member of the band took credit for this lovely tale. We're guessing it's Kevin Lynch.

As usual, we were spending Hogmany on the wet streets of our own lovely Edinburgh. The night began with the train journey across the Forth from Dunfermline, as did the drinking. By the time we got there, everyone was already fairly plastered and as the night wore on we got even more drunk on some nasty cheap rum. The rest of the night was a blur. One mate pissed himself in the street while another one had his wallet removed by a particuarly crafty prostitute (he still wont tell us exactly why he was in the company of prostitutes but that is another story alltogether), and I spent the bells throwing up down a drain. After a LONG walk back to my parents' home I put the icing on the cake by sleepwalking into my folks' room, pulling of their covers and pissing all over their feet -- something that I have absolutely no memory of (thank God). As you might guess, they were less than impressed the next morning when I sauntered downstairs with no idea of what I had done, and proceeded to humiliate me in front of my family and girlfriend -- who, when she went to get dressed just after, found out that I (at least I'm getting the blame) had also pissed in her travel bag containing all her clothes and CDs.