For those that can’t stand this time of the year, my misery seeks company. What does it for you?
For me: aside from the usual family stuff:
I worked front-end in a post office back when that meant a line-up before I opened the doors to the end of the day when I had to inform the line-up that was still out the door that, yes, I was going to close on time. (Some didn’t take that well. For me it was just another Tuesday…)
It meant a lot of work with little thanks and I had to listen to the same shitty Xmas playlist over and over all day.
Edit/PS: The quick downvote sells it. Perfection. chefs kiss
If there was no religious connotations and the gift giving shit was done away with I wouldn’t mind.
I do like how entire communities get together and do the same things like light up the streets with Christmas lights and all follow a nice theme.
But I prefer Halloween due to the lack of religion and the only expectations are to give out candy to children.
Second post, sorry. But here’s something you can enjoy. I didn’t bother trying to find all of them, but as you can tell from the numbering, there are more than these if you look for them.
Christmas Music Sucks: Part 6, The Voicemail Episode
Courtesy of Your Favorite Band Sucks. If you listen to any of the primary eps, start with a band you don’t like and realize that the schtick is that they know a ton about music and can turn their sites on any band. It doesn’t mean they actually hate everything.
Organized religion is a plague.
from 9-19 every holiday started off with my father and mother being passive-aggressive with each other. this usually continued until dad grew frustrated and began to yell or scream at me. why he targeted me I don’t know. there were two other kids. probably because they were older and would throw his shit back at him.
one year in particular he screamed at me to go burn the trash (as one did in the rural days). it was fall and was very windy. I told him it would catch the yard on fire. “just do it!” fine…
I took it out and lit it. came back inside and went back to my room because I didn’t want to get yelled at. keep in mind I was around 11 years old at the time. about 30 minutes later he’s screaming for me. I come out and about an acre of our land is on fire. it was mostly tall (dry) grass. “what’s wrong with you?! are you fucking stupid?!!” we spent the rest of the afternoon fighting the spread of the fire while he berated me. then had a disappointing dinner followed by gifts and “love” with messages like, “smile more!” and “is this not good enough for you?”
that was the day I lost all respect for my father. that was the day I stopped trusting adults.
I don’t share this to gain sympathy. I fucking hate sympathy, frankly. I share this as a cautionary tale for adults today. don’t mistreat your kids. when you’re on your deathbed, these are the things that will haunt you, and you’ll be alone to suffer without closure as your vision simply fades out to nothing.
Merry fucking Christmas.
That it’s so incredibly hyped up. You start hearing music and seeing ads and decorations for it too early. Black Friday is a complete shitshow.
Holiday travel sucks, and the possibility of shitty weather is rather high. I avoid traveling for holidays, but I’ve had to travel around Christmas for work and it is a mess.
The expectation of gift giving. I’m big into anti-consumption and don’t want to buy or receive a bunch of junk. While this expectation is more of an annoyance to me, it has actual negative impact on people who are struggling financially.
It’s become so commercialized. I’m not religious at all, but it’s become a farce.
Because I lost my parents in traumatizing ways
I just find it boring and inconvenient.
I personally don’t.
i hate the ultra consumerist version and the jesus version for different reasons
I’m Jewish, but grew up Christian (my mom converted young). I deconverted in university… heh, going to a Christian university at that. So I gave up Christmas at that time. I kinda miss it— that is, I miss the quiet memories of decorations and sitting in the dark by the fireplace watching the blinking lights… but I definitely don’t miss the loud blaring parts. And you can’t avoid the loud blaring parts. They’re freaking everywhere.
So I get to see all the things I never really liked about Christmas all the time. And it turns out that watching the channukah candles burn down with the lights turned down scratch the itch of what I ever liked about Christmas. So what’s left?
It’s a religious holiday, and I am an atheist. It means absolutely nothing to me, but people try to make me feel guilty about disliking it.
I get that. As I get more pagan the more I move my efforts from Christmas to Yule
There are tons of nonreligious expressions of it.
I couldn’t care less.
Because it promotes Christianity
We have a (presumably) non Christian here saying because it promotes Christianity and elsewhere we have a (presumably) Christian saying because it promotes paganism.
Unironically though, I think it’s cool that we have a diversity of opinions here!
Christians of that sort are incapable of fun
I’d be fine with if that’s all it was, I can respect people who maintain tradition for whatever reason. It wouldn’t be important to me, but I get logically how tradition maintains community bonds. That’s fine, we have a lot of ethnic and religious traditions that various groups follow and they don’t impose it on anyone.
But Christmas most definitely does not promote Christianity, it promotes some kind of heinous, bastardized version of modern Christianity that’s completely about meaningless product consumption, decoration and ritual without meaning.
Will growing up learning to string electric lights on a slowly-dying pine tree turn a kid Christian? Most likely not… but he is sure going to learn that when he gets his own apartment (as required in modern capitalist single-family living) he will spend that money on his own dying pine tree and string of electric lights.
Christmas is fine in moderation. The problem I have with Christmas is that people try to stretch Christmas out to have it take over other parts of the year.
I also feel like Christmas is the holiday that requires the most work and I’m not a fan of holidays that require me to do a lot.
Holy shit. You guys are miserable as fuck. Having to find a gift for your company’s Secret Santa or White Elephant event isn’t the fault of Christmas. That’s the fault of your company’s and/or society’s corporate culture.
If you find yourself miserable at a party, then don’t fucking go to it. If it’s organized by your company and you were forced to attend, then once again that’s not Christmas’ fault. Ask yourselves these questions:
- Were you forced to attend (e.g. takes place during work hours)? If yes, then blame the corporate culture.
- Does it take place after work hours? If yes, then why are you attending it? If your answer is because of pressure from your bosses and/or you fear not attending means you’ll suffer professionally, then it’s the corporate culture’s fault.
Christmas is ingrained in our culture though so to unsubscribe from certain aspects of it completely ‘others’ you from your groups.
I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies (the music especially is just so bad). The “Christmas episodes” TV shows run are so incredibly corny. I find the decorations to be tacky and ugly. I feel like I’m suffocated by so much cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away after the holidays.
I suppose that all wouldn’t be so bad if the “Christmas season” didn’t stretch out for so long. It’s now well underway before Thanksgiving, and I’m being conservative with that. That means at least 10% of the year - so 10% of my life, too - is spent under the Christmas regime.
But on a deeper level, I think it points to a real sickness in society. Capitalism has so thoroughly destroyed our real social connections to each other. It breaks those human bonds and creates atomized individuals who are only supposed to care about themselves. But that’s not who we are as a species - we are social creatures who have a couple hundred thousand years of cooperation with each other in order to survive.
On some level, capital “knows” ripping us away from our social being is not only unnatural, but atomizing us so thoroughly harms social reproduction. Christmas has become a way of resolving this problem. BUT, it’s capitalism… so the solution can’t be something like “give workers the month of December off so people can spend real quality time with each other”.
So capitalism has created this artificial holiday structure where “family”, “giving back”, and “what really matters” is centered, but it’s all done in the most superficial way possible. It’s all kabuki. Capital creates an imitation of social connection and still manages to make it about accumulating more capital. Spend money on presents. Don’t like the commercialism around presents? That’s ok, spend money on airfare or gas to see your family. Use up your meager PTO at the end of the year when it’s slow and costs your boss less. But I think getting workers to spend money is still just the secondary objective of Christmas. It’s much more about getting people to forget how deeply separated we are from each other. To pretend for at least 10% of the year that everything is normal, capitalism is normal and being disconnected from each other is normal so long as you watch a couple movies once a year that are supposed to remind you that “what really matters is family” - the feeling though, not the reality.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
(Copying what I said on the lemmy.ml cross post because I’ve been thinking about this for a while and want to get it out).
