Fri., Nov. 21, 7pm

Tiniest Bar in Texas , 817 W. Fifth

Hold it off one more week. Do it for us. We know you’re all ready to take that peppermint-flavored candy cane stick pony ride into the holiday season, but it’s not here yet. It’s not time. You just think it is because the Madison Avenue greed whores are already burning up prime time with yuletide schmaltz, no doubt shitting trou at the thought of millions of Americans staying home for the holidays this year making eggnog and wassailing instead of wearing out the magnetic strips on their MasterCards at the shopping mall. Pretty much everyone except Bill O’Reilly knows that the “X” in “X-mas” stands for mark next to the line on the credit card receipt where you sign your name, and the credit card season starts whenever the ads start airing and the chumps start charging. For now, it’s the day after Halloween, but in a few years the Neil Diamond Christmas Special will be bumping out a tedious, awkwardly uncomfortable hour of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. Who loses? The kids. Well, not Jerry’s kids. They’ll at least get to see the Jewish Elvis belt out a soul-stirring rendition of “O Holy Night” instead of watching Gary Lewis phone in his millionth cruise-boat version of “Everybody Loves a Clown” while papa Lewis squeezes out a well-rehearsed teardrop of pride. No, kids all over America will lose because after they’ve whined for four months about Wiis and Game Boys and pee-squirting dolls, their parents will either a) attempt infanticide or b) actually turn to Jesus. Either scenario is a huge money saver for the parents but an even bigger bummer for the kids. Being dead is no walk in the park (unless you’re still haunting one), but being the spawn of a Jesus freak is a one-way ticket to Dullsville. It’s the difference between a white-knuckled car chase in Grand Theft Auto IV and freezing your ass off handing out sack lunches to the homeless. Both are skills that should be useful to children in the hard times ahead, but real homeless people are rarely as entertaining as video-game gangsters. Plus, all that do-gooding will send the wrong message to America’s youth. Capitalism works best when the money trickles upstream to the most wealthy. Turn it around, and the whole model goes to shit. It’s probably just as well for the time being. Philanthropy isn’t going to service all that Chinese debt any more than irresponsible consumerism, but if the economy is going to hell in a handbasket anyway, we might as well help out the home team, right? That’s not a very X-massy sentiment, but Creditmas may not come at all this year. If you want to give this altruism thing a try, you might want to start small, and what better place to do that than at the Tiniest Bar in Texas? This Friday at TBIT a group called Team Spiridon is hosting the “Night of the Moustache,” a benefit for Emancipet, an organization dedicated to preventing animal homelessness, and the Dick Beardsley Foundation, a nonprofit providing grants for people seeking treatment for chemical dependency. The event features a silent auction plus music by Eat a Peach, an Allman Brothers tribute band, and Girl Guitar, a group of up-and-coming female artists.

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