With the holiday season upon us, the word on everyone’s lips seems to be ‘miracle.’ Hell, 2011 was the year of miracles (not actual, wonderful, parting the seas, curing disease miracles, because according to this compendium of images, this year was frighteningly horrific), and it seemed like everything from dirt to magnets was deemed miraculous by someone, only to be promptly dismissed as decidedly non-miraculous by someone else. The upshot is that no word has probably ever been said more than the word ‘miracle’ has been said in North America this year. And now, with the hyperbolic Christmas season rearing its relentlessly cheerful head, the miracles are becoming even more abundant. Everywhere you go it’s another fucking miracle. Christmas miracles, y’all! I can’t wipe my ass without finding a few new coagulated remnants of miracles. And as ANYONE who loves the baby jesus will tell you, the greatest miracle of all is what? That’s right! Babies!

Babies and children are miracles! Didn’t you hear? You, yeah you, with the steamy turd halfway out of your ass, reading this on your phone, YOU! Sitting there in your jerking station with your semi-soft pud in one hand while you toggle back and forth between this page and pornography, YOU with the flapjack tits and shitty job and hairy bush! YOU over there with the brown front tooth and skin that’s way too distressed for someone as old as you, YOU were once a miracle back when you were a baby (and to a lesser extent, a child), before you turned into the disgusting hideous bag of shit that you currently are (nice fucking sweater, by the way). Babies are miracles, boy. Don’t you forget it. From the little baby jesus all the way down to some brown baby in some bullshit country that probably won’t even live that long because his lazy parents didn’t have the foresight to not give birth to him in such a stupid, backass country…even that hungry little fucker with the flies and shit all over him, he’s a miracle too. Even him! And rainbows after it rains. Those are also miracles.

But, stupid dead-horse-flogging of the stupidity of the ICP song aside, the point I want to really address here is the idea that babies are miracles. Babies. Now, I’m a father of two. I have a boy and a girl. Both of them were, at one point, babies. The girl, it could be argued, is still a baby. She is dangerously cute. Her brother, now three, is also cute. There is nothing I would not do for them. When I think about the fact that someday they’re gonna be old and not want to hang out with me or hug me and in fact they’re gonna tell me to go fuck myself and actively set out to enrage me, it makes me want to cry. I cringe at the notion that they’ll someday be corrupted by this world and their beautiful innocence will vanish forever. Nothing makes me sadder or happier than these little people. But they’re not miracles. And they definitely weren’t miracles when they were born. They were and are great little people, but people, even tiny ones, aren’t miracles. Want evidence? Look around. If every person starts out as a miracle that means that either A)we’ve got a pretty low standard for miracles or B) The word miracle means something vastly different than I’ve been led to believe.

Babies are the industrial waste runoff by-product of a good time (fucking, for you virgins out there). There’s nothing miraculous about a consequence. Calling a baby a miracle is akin to saying “it’s probably gonna wind up being the best thing that ever happened to you” after your buddy gets fired. Babies can be amazing, but a miracle? A miracle is like turning a pile of shit into a dove or making your dick grow six inches overnight or something. Babies are about as miraculous as (if you’ll permit me one more time) magnets.

You want to know what’s a miracle? People that grow up from being babies to not be completely disgusting asshole, dickbag, thoughtless, gross tubs of shit. That’s a miracle. If you look around, it’s astounding that we’re not even worse than we all are. You’ve gotta navigate a lot of pricks and cocksuckers and Subway restaurants and anal bleaching and Kardashians and shit to get out of this shitshow unspoiled (and yes, I’m acutely aware that I’m shitting on ICP and the Kardashians in the same rant, which is pretty hacky and obvious. I know all about it, assholes).

If I’m looking around my house, I gotta say my wife is ten thousand times the miracle that my kids are (and don’t get me started on me. I’m a gross failure of the highest [lowest] order). She’s nice and patient and pretty and fun and not a judgy cunt even after years of dealing with the bullshit of other people and the poison that seems like it just seeps up from the sewers and makes everyone around these parts a complete dipshit (I found out this past weekend that ‘dipshit’ is Scott Baio’s favorite word to ridicule his twitter followers with, so again, my glibness is little more than crappy, obvious pandering).  That’s a miracle. Not something that just slides out of someones beaver three quarters of a year after a night of bad decisions. That’s runoff. That’s an STD. Quit calling everybody miracles, please.

Of course, there’s potential in all these little people to become miracles, and most of them will fail spectacularly and turn into people like you or me. But some of them will whether the storm and not end up as ungodly piles of shit like the rest of us.  Some of them will grow up and be good, pretty and smart and kind. And if you find one, do what I did and cling to them for dear life and drag them down with you, because, uh, have you seen yourself? You’re not gonna get lucky twice, you disgusting pile of shit.

Happy holidays!