Ugh. I really hate this time of year. The busy stores. The stupid movies and ads on TV. The music. It really gets under my skin — every fucking year.
Obviously, I don’t agree with the religious side of Christmas. I hate being reminded of how dominating Christianity is where I live. But it’s much more than that.
Why can’t a holiday just be on the scheduled day it’s supposed to be? Why does Christmas have to last two fucking months? Sometimes I see Christmas shit in stores in October. Don’t you dare overshadow Halloween!
And then there are the gifts. I love how stores so thoughtfully send catalogs through snail mail (even though you don’t ask for them) just so your kids can get their hands on them. My six-year-old daughter circled every fucking toy in the Meijer catalog the other day.
Not to mention my husband and I don’t have a lot of money. We always go into the new year broke. I mean really, what is the point of all this?
I am the biggest Scrooge and I really don’t have a point to this post. I just wanted to bitch and I’m hoping you get me and want to bitch, too.
I say we make Christmas a second Halloween or second Thanksgiving. Who’s with me?
Sure, it can be annoying, especially the relentless music….and stupid movies…and advertisements. I even used to enjoy it all but now I just try to ignore it. I don’t go shopping for stuff any more and the only reason to put up a tree is to make my elderly mother with Alzheimer’s happy. It will probably be her last one and I am not going to go out of my way to make her miserable. So….out to the garage I go to get the tree. Just saying, you don’t have to participate in the nonsense if you don’t need to nor do you have to spend a boat load of money on it. Next year, I too will probably let my inner Scrooge shine. Or not. It’s my choice..
I agree. Put Christ back into Christmas and put Christmas back into church.
Leave the rest of us out of it.
Xmas is just like Halloween. Those who are in to it should go to their local haunted-house/church for the midnight mass rave to see if they see Caspar the friendly Holy Ghost.
Everyone else should treat Xmas and other Christian holidays the way they treat Islamic and Jewish holy days. How are your neighbors and local stores planning this year to celebrate the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Has your family yet set up the tangled pile of rope in the corner of your house where you put presents to honor the FSM?
R’amen!
You are singing my song. And it’s not one of those sappy ones we’ve all been hearing in stores since October.
Recently (as in a day or two ago), a friend sent me an article about the extra stress the holiday puts on everyone–but mostly women. And it’s not for a day or even a week; it’s 3 months now. Even the article fell down, however–its solution was to give women ways to cope with the additional burden.
My advice, as someone who was in the Xmas trenches with the kids–learn to say “No” when you’re asked to do stuff that you really don’t want to do. For example; my kids’ public schools had endless plays and pageants and music concerts and class party that needed cards for every child and Secret Santa and collective gift to the teacher. Then, at work, there was Secret Santa and homemade gingerbread village contests and cookie days where everyone was expected to bring in a dozen, dozen creatively and uniquely baked and decorated cookies to win a ribbon and then swap with other people’s cookies, and a week of cubicle decorating and special festive clothing that was different for each day of the week…culminating with an organization-wide feast the day before Christmas where everyone was expected to cook and bake and decorate and clean up after.
This on top of the gift-buying and card-writing and house-decorating and all the other endless hoopla around the season. And all the charity stuff including pictures with Santa for this charity and walk-of-lights for that charity and send in money for some other charity…
No. Just, No. “No,” is a complete sentence.
Decide what is important to you, and do just that. For example, I told the kids when they were young that I could do ONE thing of theirs–the holiday concert OR making stuff for their class party OR (insert the activity of the season). I contributed to the teacher’s gift, but I didn’t go out shopping for it or wrap it or take time off work to present it. I paid a food bank’s culinary class to make me cookies–which fulfilled my charity and my cookie-baking and -decorating for work. My decorating this year consisted of hanging my wreath made up of gold and red and silver bells on the front door. It’s wasteful and tacky to put up an entire National Lampoon’s Christmas worth of lights and plastic blow-up figures all over the lawn.
OH! This is probably the most important: something I’ve found to be soothing and good for my well-being is to get out and walk, every day. You could bundle up in the evening and the whole family could walk around looking at other people’s decorations. Or, if there’s a park or somewhere inspiring around you, take a walk during the day.
I do not know whether I hate them as much as you do, but I do hate Christmas very strongly. Especially the vomit-inducing music in stores. There is not a single Christmas song that I like, they are all vapid and repetitive.
Wholeheartedly agree! I could have written this post/rant myself during any fall/winter season in any of the last several decades. I really hate the consumerism, advertising, repetitive xmas music, and the one or two gaudy lighting displays that weirdos do that make me think they raided a Disney Electric Light Parade float (my subtler neighbors lighting I tend to enjoy).
I really only like the day or two when everybody gets together to cook, feast, drink and be merry. Other than that, I do what I can to tone down the “season” and encourage it to be shorter and less frenzied, but generally just hunker down and patiently wait for January 2nd to arrive.
Those such as I who were raised Catholic understand the concept of days of obligation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_day_of_obligation).
Well, for me, Christmas is kinda like that (as are other similar holidays) — I think of them as days of social obligation. It’s considered churlish to not participate.
For example, when I was working, wherever I worked had the obligatory Xmas party — and it was not a good career or social move to not attend. So attend I did.
FWIW, I managed to get out of the obligatory gift-giving back in my early 20s, so that’s nice. Trying to find suitable gifts for one’s family, friends and social acquaintances was… well, ‘trying’, almost as much as pretending to like the obligatory gifts I was given. 😉
Way back when, I found this poem in a 1962 copy of the now defunct magazine “The Reporter.”
A favorite since, but rather than print it out, I’ll link it.
https://sacompassion.net/poem-santa-claus-by-howard-nemerov/
Yep. Also all the lights, mess, crowds, terrible music are a sensory hell
I posted yesterday and it seems to have gotten eaten.
It seems to me that since the 1990s, in the USA, there’s been an aggressive, in-your-face aspect to celebrating Christmas. Your paper, throw-away coffee cup is just red and green but says nothing about Jesus? Pitch a fit! It’s Halloween and the Christmas crap isn’t up in your favorite store? Pitch a fit! Your neighbor celebrates Hanukah? Pitch a fit!
Since I got fed up with my “proud boy” nephew in law and banned him from coming to christmas at my home Im happy with having my wifes family over for christmas. Theyve been coming here for 40 years. Nephew has made everyone miserable for about ten of those years. He is homophobic, racist, and well, lets just say he is a piece of shit and good riddance. The kids are all grown up and on their own so its just the adults now. We have dinner, exchange presents and actually take the time to talk to each other instead of listening to nephew spout hatred at anyone who would listen. There is no god allowed in our christmas or jesus or whoever. Its a holiday of sharing and giving. We pick names and get gifts that each person asks for and its pretty mellow now. Its a shame it took 35 years to get here, but better late than never I suppose.
What I hate most about Christmas is that I’m absolutely sick of hearing about it before Thanksgiving. Except for this year, when I got sick of hearing all the hype before Halloween.
As for the music, I don’t mind the “standard” carols, but I absolutely hate songs like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” which flat-out tell everyone keep on telling each other how wonderful this time of year is, with no actual reason to think it is.
I once heard some sappy shmaltzy tear-jerker song about an angel watching over an exhausted US soldier in Iraq while he slept on Christmas Eve night, far away from his family blah blah blah. It was a definite saccharine overdose, but AT LEAST it admitted, as no other routinely-overplayed Christmas song did, that there were people who weren’t able to have the happy Christmas we’re always trying to fabricate for ourselves.
Just listen to Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Christmas music instead (I got mine from the Nonesuch label). There’s also a Medieval Babes Christmas CD.
OOOH, Medieval Babes put out a Christmas CD?!?! I have a couple that I bring out for the work “festival week”. One is just a plain guitar. The other CD is hammered dulcimer. They both play the older songs, not the auto-tuned pop-tart version or the absolute dreck of the 1960s/1960s. Or the “country” songs, like the sappy one about the dying mother and the shoes. That one can just go off and disappear forever.
Where I live, the news is encouraging people’s over-the-top noise-and-lights displays. You wouldn’t think we’re a planet in ecological crisis, the way people waste electricity and create noise-and-light pollution.
I’m with dangerousbeans @9. It’s all a sensory hell. Too bright, too loud, too shiny, too many overlapping smells, too many people, and I’m supposed to (pretend to be) happy about it or I’m “ruining the mood”.
The Medieval Babes’ Christmas CD is called “Mistletoe & Wine.” There’s also two CDs by Anonymous 4, “On Yoolis Night” and “Christmas Music from Medieval Hungary.”
Quite amusing is the Dagon Tabernacle Choir — seehttps://www.hplhs.org/solstice.php
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTHn2tHhcI