Tis the Season of Bull Shit

[Angrboda]

I can't say I've given it a lot of thought. I enjoy the holidays, and religion is kinda my thing, so I enjoy all the ritual and shit. It doesn't really bother me. People complain about the consumerism, but I see that as incoherent political posturing, grandstanding for ideology. The nature of our industrial society has some problem trends, but anti-consumerist nutballs seem to want to reify certain contributors as evil incarnate and I just don't buy it; economies are systems, and you can't look at an isolated part of the system and blame the behavior of the whole system on that part.

And I rather like my family, even though they go terribly overboard at Christmas time. Towards the end of November, to mid-January is when my first major depression of the season usually hits. So many Christmases when I'm supposed to be enjoying family and turkey and embarrassing family stories, I'm at home, hiding under my pillow, afraid to answer the phone, and feeling even guiltier for not answering it, knowing my family likely wonders where I am and if I'm okay or not, and why I haven't shown up for yet another Christmas. And knowing all this, I still can't get myself to call or answer the phone, so I just sink even deeper.

Some years that doesn't align that way, and I'm able to have a decent Christmas as planned, where I focus on family, as that's Christmas to me. But even if it's not, when I finally start to lose the blackness inside me and reconnect, and we're able to celebrate, and everybody has waited for me once again, I enjoy a guilt tinged Christmas with them, but it's still worth it. If anything, I truly realize how loved I really am at those times.

I don't know. I'm probably one of the most cynical people you'll meet, but Christmas just doesn't bother me. I rather like it. It's like pieces of my childhood projected forward in time.