I hate Christmas. I’ve said this before and probably several different times. Where I work, the Christmas decorations go up in the first week of November. By the time December rolls around, I’ve already moved on to being ready for the New Year, but I’ve got another thirty-damn-one days left to go.Commercials are rampant with BUYBUYBUY and despite the fact that the entire nation is in a recession barrelling head first into another great depression, the pressure to buy more and outdo last year or at the very least, live up to last year’s Christmas breathes down the back of your neck.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Add to that the fairy tales of Santa Clause and the birth of Jesus and there is too much hoopla for my liking. Breathe down my neck all you want about me calling the birth of Jesus a fairy tale, but if he was born in the manner described in the bible, then he was born in the spring, not in winter. If you’ve ever been to that area of the world, or know someone who has been, then you would know that winters are actually pretty cold there and a shepherd would NOT have been tending his flock by night out in a field IN THE DEAD OF WINTER. But I digress.
And as for Santa, my sister and I had that figured out very early in life since “Santa’s” handwriting looked EXACTLY like my mother’s. I think I was 5 or 6 when I figured it out. Plus, I like the Dutch version of Christmas better, anyway. Much more entertaining. Especially when you hear David Sedaris tell it. (That’s a link to the audio of him relating the tale of St. Nicholas. It’s long, but worth the time it takes to listen to it.)
Couple that with my almost complete inability to deal with winter and you can forget me being any fun. Also? All my childhood traditions that involved Christmas? Gone. I will never be able to recreate that. We spent every year we were in Saudi at the beach all day long Christmas day after we opened our presents. Sometimes we raced through opening presents just to get to the beach faster. And it wasn’t just us. It was a big group of unrelated people that would go and spend the day playing on the beach and then go home to eat a HUGE dinner at someone’s house. You can forget that happening in December in Alabama.
I find that I feel more alienated from my friends and family this time of year than any other time of the year and I hate it. HATE IT.
Geez, pity party much?
I think I’ll go knit a baby sweater now.
