• Why do all the stores have to be closed today?

• I hate hearing the same 4 songs over and over again.

• the holidays are inauthentic. I think I hate that the most.

• the fact that some people are triggered by “happy holidays”.

Just another obligation on a ultragigagigantic list of obligations.

I can’t stand it. Consumerism whipped up to a frenzy, certain people preaching about giving to the needy, then not hearing a peep from the same people after January 1st, same Xmas songs over and over and over again… It all just feels fake and I want it to be over.

I worked retail for many years so… yeah.

I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies. 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.

It’s a deeply conservative, religious, capitalist holiday that is forced on all of us. It generates a shit ton of waste. The music is absolutely terrible and drives me crazy. It’s not an accessible holiday, and deeply traumatizing for a lot of (especially queer) people. It brings out people’s privileges, but we’re all expected to go along with it and be happy, and if you don’t observe it everyone treats you like you’re insane. Fuck Christmas, the Grinch was right.

I’d much rather observe the solstice

Edit: also who the fuck is happy with the state of the world?

Because it is all manufactured now.

When you were a kid, you were excited the moment you sniffed that November air as the seasons were starting to transition. That unexplainable feeling to know that soon, Christmas was coming. And you were waiting and waiting for it to come. December rolls around, every week, you got excited, you saw people put up their decorations and saw them. You saw all of the planned christmas specials. Your school had christmas themes, you anticipated snow days and more.

It felt festive and great.

Now you’ve grown up and eventually that magic is gone. If you work retail, you will hate this time of year or any job that doesn’t give you the holidays off. People are fighting with eachother about whose family is coming to see whom, familial drama. You wonder what the point is having so many decorations on someone’s house is, worrying about what electric bill they’d have lighting all of that up. You fret every day as to what you get your loved ones, whether they’d even like it or not. You may be too broke to get something. Random shit happens to you, you hate driving on snow and the ice.

All the while everything feels forced, the music is repetitive, the specials are repetitive, capitalism is telling you what to do with your time and your money. All of that magical feeling is just…gone.

The country and most of the world has gone to complete shit. I am broke and miserible. But I’m supposed to act merry, sing songs and buy shit for other people? It’s complete madness!

I have separate and unrelated blood feuds with every one of Santa’s reindeer

I don’t hate it, it’s just is what it is.

• Work isn’t slowing down, there’s no “Christmas is coming” mood anymore. It’s a rush and stress before and after it and no matter how much you got it done, you’re going to be behind schedule when you’re back.
• Rush, crowds everywhere.
• The artificial feel of it. Inauthentic essence that wants you to be authentically happy.
• Isolation.

one word summer

yes I live in the south hemisphere

Too many reminders of how fake things are. Too many ties to a shitty childhood of lies.

In the northern hemisphere its the worst time of year to travel. bad weather, sickness. kids get off but adults get a day or two. people get worse for so many reasons this time of year and yet you are the asshole for not wanting to deal with it all.

I don’t but I dislike that, at least in the UK, it’s yet another excuse to drink until your last brain cell commits suicide. It wasn’t enough that it was a repurposed pagan festivity, one that at least pushed people into thinking about God and being grateful by the Jesus proxy, which then turned into a Coca Cola, consumerist festivity, now it also has to be an excuse for alcoholism and debauchery? Tsk tsk.

Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th. There is no birth narrative in the earliest gospel, Mark, it is an invention of later writers. I think the Romans put his “birthday” on the calendar close to Saturnalia to appease the Saturnalians or whatever.

I like to call it the Solstice (because that’s more or less what it is), with Solstice trees, Solstice cookies, etc.

Christmas, IMHO, is really for kids, not for adults. After the kids grow up, consider celebrating the Solstice by giving to their favorite charity (or better yet, your favorite open source software developer). This SNL video pretty much sums up for me Christmas as it is now for most people: an empty gesture.