Reflections of Christmas

I finally admitted something to myself today. I strongly dislike Christmas. It has taken me some time to get past the venomous accusation of being "a scrooge!!" or "horrible person!!" and admit it. The reader is at this point (unless they think I'm from Afghanistan) is undoubtedly aghast. But it is true. I really don't like Christmas at all. Now this certainly doesn't mean that I hate everything associated with Christmas, quite the contrary in fact. I think all of the gift-giving, food-sharing, and family/friend-fraternization is excellent. All of those are very good indeed. But to be perfectly honest, although those things are associated to the Christmas tradition, they are in no way unique to the Christmas tradition. They happen all throughout the year and are in no way restricted to the holiday season. And I think they are essential to living a happy life. So obviously that's not what I dislike. What I dislike are those "joyous" things that you will only find around Christmas (not everything, mind you, just those things that I shall relate to you). Take Christmas decorations for instance. I vehemently hate most Christmas decorations. Not only are they generally ugly plastic impressions of things like little deranged automaton-dwarves running around in the snow, but they're useless and they abound in innumerable quantities! You can only use them for about 3 weeks out of the year, and they you have to find a place to store the rotten things. Plus a lot of them are probably made by slave/sweatshop labor in 3rd-world countries. Now that I find simply hypocritical. I also don't like this excessive preparation that Christmas entails. My sister has spent the past two days solid working feverishly on Christmas cookie decorating parties, Christmas dinner parties, Christmas tree decorating, Christmas-garland-on-the-railing-of-the-stairs-decorating that renders the railing entirely unusable for a significant duration of time. And then she has to force me to help with her Christmas mania, yelling at me when I refuse. But that's just the tip of the iceberg...

The worst part about Christmas is the rampant consumerocomericialism. My sunday newspaper weighs at least twice as much on the sunday before Christmas as it does at the beginning of march. It's horrible! I hate the ads, and Christmas just makes them bigger, better, and more obnoxious, plus it uses up a lot of paper (as if buying a paper instead of just using the internet wasn't bad enough... my conscience weighs heavy on me). Everywhere you look it's about how much and how many, how large and how wide. Instead of thinking about the less fortunate 5 billion people, the media and corporate advertisements turn us into tyranically monsters of material.

And then there's the whole religion thing. That doesn't really bother me too much, but I happen to have exactly zero religious beliefs, and although I have an unchanged respect for anyone regardless of their beliefs, the worship of a dead person nailed to a post is slightly... well... it isn't exactly the most likely thing that I would imagine would serve as the icon of a religion.

Maybe I don't hate Christmas at all, maybe it's just the modern Christmas I don't like. So before I am nailed to a post, and serve as the next religious icon when my sister and mother find out what I have been writing here (blasphemeous disgrace to the cult of Christmas, first rate), I'd better go. Oh and by the way, just think about the idea of Santa Clause: he knows where you live, he knows if you've been good or bad, he comes into your house at night through the chimney, and he has an army of elf-helpers at the north pole. It's a little scary.