The deal with me & Christmas
Without going into much of the more personal details, I just have to say that– for the most part– Christmas has never been an exceptionally happy holiday for me. No, I’m not saying I’m one of those people who has “lost sight” of what Christmas is originally meant to celebrate for the Christian set. I obviously understand all of that because I was brought up Catholic. I just honestly am not a big holiday person, and the materialistic excess that this season tends to promote annoys me further. If you want to get how I feel about Christmas in general, watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. How Charlie feels at the beginning of the movie is a pretty accurate summary of how I feel about this time of year.
I hate trying to explain my general ambivalence to others– they mark me a Scrooge or a Grinch or what have you. Especially because I won’t sit there and enumerate for them the personal reasons I have a distaste for the holidays, they just assume I’m an uppity hater. Somehow you either love this time of year or you’re automatically “anti”. At some point, you just see how routine/fake it is. (Maybe this has to do with the fact that I don’t see snow. But I do see scarves and boots. That’s a different story.)
I’ll tell you what I do appreciate about the so-called holiday spirit. It’s nice that it puts some people in a generous mood, helps people put their past year in perspective and pledge to be a better person for the upcoming new year. It’s a great excuse to patch up differences or show appreciation to those around you. And it’s a chance to forge lifetime memories with those around you. But none of these opportunities are exclusive to Thanksgiving-Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa-New Year’s.
If this holiday spirit is so beautiful, why can’t people learn to feel it the other 364 (365 on leap years) days of the year? On the 25th you’re happily serving soup to homeless people to feel warm and fuzzy, but on any other day you won’t even look them in the eye when they ask for change? Come on. Just be real.
If only we could remove the onset of stress over gift giving, the sales extravaganzas, the unnecessary wish lists and awkward attempts at forcing yuletide memories to happen… and just remember simple happiness can look like this any day of the year, I could be down for the holidays again:
(I wasn’t sure how else to segue into sharing that clip from one of the few accessible Christmas-y things I enjoy. But there ya go.)
Perhaps one day the holidays and I can be friends again. In the meantime I will continue striving to be a real reflection of who I am all year round, and hope that I exude the “holiday spirit” longer than the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
If you’re reading this and celebrate this holiday season, I really hope you have a happy one, and that the feeling spills over into 2010.
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Tags: ambivalence, being real, Christmas, commercialization, Holidays
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