Each year I find myself greeting the holiday season more with cynicism than gladness.

My excitement endures only until everyone else gets into the holiday spirit and begin scurrying about and buying Christmas stuff.

It's impossible for me to join in the festive gift-buying frenzy. I'm broke.

Why is it that the largest bills of the year seem always to come due around Christmas? In the past week alone, I've spent $2,400 I don't have, and I still haven't bought a single Christmas gift. I have a vehicle that won't run and a property tax bill that's due at the end of the month.

I'm not complaining. Such is life for most young families struggling to get by, and mine should be no different. It is best to embrace hardship when it comes and reap the benefits of character it inheres.

Of course, I don't need money or gifts to savor the season that celebrates the birth of Christ. But with four young children, the fun is in the giving. Still, fighting the pushy, harried crowds to buy a handful of inexpensive goodies breeds cynicism and an enmity for mankind.

It's with a spirit of misanthropy, then, that I share news of the bleak and absurd this holiday season, courtesy of the Associated Press.

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A recent report out of Washington found that one of every 92 American men between the ages of 27 and 39 -- and one of every 33 young black men -- might have the AIDS virus. The author of the study said if the trend continues, "the threat of AIDS may become a rite of passage" for young people.

Lord have mercy. A killer venereal disease a rite of passage?

Cornelius Baker of the National Association of People With AIDS said the new study helps the average American understand HIV's real and growing threat. "I don't think most people really get it, that (infection) is a potential for them," Baker said.

I've got news for Mr. Baker. The "average American" is not threatened by HIV, because the average American doesn't engage in the behavior that causes the overwhelming majority of AIDS cases. We don't need more studies and AIDS awareness seminars and candlelight vigils to stem this disease. What's needed is a health policy that is equivalent to someone who grabs needle-sharing drug addicts and high-risk homosexuals by the shoulders, shakes them and says: "Stop that!"

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From Anaheim, Calif., comes a story of a former Mouseketeer who was robbed in a Disneyland parking lot. Billie Jean Matay, who was a member of the "Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, is suing the park. She contends that when guards took her family in for questioning, Disneyland workers were only partially costumed, thereby exposing her grandchildren "to the reality that the Disney characters were, in fact, make-believe."

Sounds like a good trade-off to me: The kids find out that Mickey's really some college kid in a mask. In return, they learn Grandma is a certifiable buffoon.

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Speaking of buffoons, three Huntington Beach, Calif., police academy instructors lost their jobs last week after ordering two cadets to eat cigarette sandwiches as punishment for lighting up.

The cadets admitted being smokers after one of the instructors smelled smoke on a cadet's clothing. The instructors directed the recruits to put their cigarettes between two slices of bread and take two bites each. Both cadets vomited, and one collapsed and was taken, unconscious, to the hospital.

I realize smoking is considered by many to be the most vile vice imaginable, but isn't this carrying things a bit far?

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In another story from California, a woman was sentenced to a year in jail for allowing her husband to have sex with his teen-age stepdaughter.

Deborah Louise Bower told detectives that her husband, James, threatened to leave her because she could not become pregnant. The infertile couple couldn't afford a surrogate and apparently desperate for a solution to the problem, Mrs. Bower decided the only answer was to let James have sex with her 14-year-old daughter.

No word whether the daughter became pregnant, but James left anyway. He committed suicide earlier this year. Mrs. Bower will have to live with her shame.

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Frank Meyer wrote in his book "In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Manifesto," that "unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous." Perhaps a look at some of the viciousness of fallen mankind will focus thoughts on the true reason for the season: The birth of him who came to redeem us from this mess.

Jay Eastlick is news editor of the Southeast Missourian.