So, by now you can get the sense that maybe, just maybe, I hate the Holiday Season.

That kinda hate -- it has consequences. One New Year’s Eve a bunch of years back, after I left the PR firm, I decided that maybe I had been wrong most of my life. I wanted to try to do a holiday right. So I took the woman I was dating, and I told her, "Let's do something grand for the New Year."

She said she was up for anything, so I considered. What does, I thought, one do for a New Year’s Eve celebration?

Being in New York, a lot of people assume that I'd consider going to Times Square an option right off the bat. Which is how I know those people aren't from here. Let me explain Times Square on NYE for you:

Take everyone you've ever known and everyone they've ever known and everyone those people have ever known. Make them stand in an area about three blocks by two blocks long. Just cram them in. At the center, put speakers turned way too loud and camera crews. Then get everyone drunk. Now tell me if that seems like a good place to stand for four or six hours in the cold.

So, no, Times Square wasn't going to happen. No way in fucking hell.

I thought that maybe we could get out of town, in fact. Go somewhere quiet and celebrate at a little bed and breakfast along some highway somewhere. Neither of us drove, but we could get a train to all sorts of sleepy little towns.

She agreed, and we settled on a trip down to Dutch Amish country, out along PA. It was as far from the lights and noise of New York we could think of. No lights, no cars, not a single luxury except each other. A Gilligan's Island of the Amish.

I booked us a room in a tiny motel out there, and we plotted a course for destiny. Or at least celebration. We figured it like this:

Without anyone drunkenly screaming we could spend time together. With our watches we could tell the exact time and lord it over the Amish who would treat us like gods for knowing exactly when the year rolled over. It'd be something brand new. Maybe they would ride us around town in a buggy so we could proclaim the exact minute of things.

Not that the Amish are like a Cargo Cult from the South Pacific circa 1941 or anything. Well, they kinda do seem it some days. And we were hoping that maybe we were right.

Life with Debbie was kinda nice. She stayed over a lot, and we made a good couple. We didn't fight too much, and neither of us asked about the other's past. We lived for the moment, and she could drink me under the table. She hated holidays the way I did, and we were seriously considering moving in together. This trip, it would be the start, we agreed, of a test to see if things would work out between us.

I decided, to myself, that this would be the end of my hatred of holidays. I would start fresh with the year's rollover and go from there. All my past transgressions were behind me: my fucking up other people's Xmas parties as well my horrible youth spent dreading and hating Xmas and other holidays. It was all behind me. I was starting fresh.

We got the 1:18 out of Penn Station and arrived in PA in the mid-afternoon sun. It was a crisp, cold day, and we loved it. We grabbed a cab to out motel and settled in, unpacking and kissing and laughing. We hit the local diner and had a meal, settling back into our room for a drink or two. Debbie mixed us some cocktails, and we sat on the bed sipping them.

When I woke up I wondered first why I had to wake up. I wasn't sleepy. I remembered drinking and laughing. Then I realized I was naked and the room was as empty as it was before we showed up. Debbie, it seems, had drugged me, rolled me for everything I had, and left me in a motel in PA, naked and broke.

By the time I managed to get back to my apartment, it was January 8th, and my apartment was bare except for my typewriter with a single sheet of paper in it.

"Watching the ball drop was fun. See you never. xoxoxoxo Debbie"

That bitch not only stole everything I had (using a fake name I found out later and seemingly skipped town), but she had gone to see the ball drop on top of it?

Bitch.

Which really reminded me why I don't like holidays. At all.