Byline: Nathan Graziano

I dragged the dead Christmas tree from our living room into the backyard. Hands sticky with sap, I knew what was on its way. It’s cellular in some senses. My physical body knows—days of a lack of appetite, an incessant need to sleep.

Maybe this year we need to go easy on ourselves. We’ve lived through a historical horror flick, and the fact that you’re reading this right now means you made it through this year. We made it through this year.

But Christmas gift-giving, to me, seems to devolve into more demarcations between the “have’s” and “have not’s” in this country, which is antithetical to the spirit of the season.

While decorating the house, they would blast Christmas music—I’m currently considering legal action against Mariah Carey—then spend the rest of the day watching the abject inanity of Christmas movies on The Hallmark Channel, which recycles the same essential plot from November until New Year’s Eve with myriad arrays of three-dimensional characters.

I know. Every family has its idiosyncrasies. Everyone has the strange relative who shows up to dinner with a boa constrictor wound around their neck, or the red-eyed drunken uncle who has been looking for discarded Donald Trump ballots in the streams and dumpsters of Pennsylvania. But here’s my family’s strange contribution.

Movember is an online charity movement to raise awareness of men’s health issues, both physical and mental, such as prostate cancer, testicular cancer and men’s suicide. In short, you grow a mustache for the month of November (no shame) to call attention to these important issues and try to solicit donations. As someone who lives with mental illness, the idea appealed to me.