Am I the only one who dreads the holidays?

I...have issues with Christmas. On the one hand, I always like the holidays. On the other hand, my Dad died two days before Christmas and his birthday was New Year's Eve, so this whole time reminds me of how much I miss him. I also don't spend the holidays with my siblings because of reasons, so I end up going to a friend's house, and it still feels awkward to me even though I've been going for years and it reminds me of how crappy my family is.

But I still manage to squeeze some enjoyment out of it. Somehow. Mostly by focusing on the good things about it. Like the food. :D

I hate Christmas with a burning fiery passion, as everyone already knows.

I do, however, fucking love the HP Lovecraft Society's two discs of carols.

I'm dreading the possibility of having to work this christmas and missing the family gathering at my grandma's place for the first time in my life. It's a 220 km trip and I have no car so it's not like I can get off work at six and just head over there on christmas eve.

But then again, I'm happy to have a job no matter what, and the schedule hasn't been set yet so there's still hope.

I don't dread the holidays so much as just ignore them. Since my extended family sucks and lives in other states for me they are pretty much ordinay days except everything is closed.

IT'S A TRAAAAPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I used to hate it (and I still hate the little brother), but it's grown on me over the years. My mother LOVES it, and insists on leaving the TV on TBS all day when they do the 24 hour thing. I think I've been numbed by exposure.

The one bright spot at Christmas: Elf.

You should get her back by claiming to have a better Christmas film to watch, from the same director no less, and then putting on BLACK CHRISTMAS all day.

MEMOIRS. NOW.

I've politely hated christmas for years - not the family stuff or the food, but everything else. I really try to keep that under my hat because others enjoy it. For a few years running there's also been money as an issue.

EDIT: I also puked my guts out royal in the church basement as a teenager, but it was New Years Day (which is a Holy Day of Obligation™). Not as cool as madkevin's story? True, but before puking up royal in the basement, I puked in the front row of church. Into a grocery bag, thankfully, which some extraordinarily thoughtful friend had had the forethought to stuff into my jacket pocket while schlepping me home the night before.

Random fact: Paul McCartney earns about $400,000 in royalties every year for "Wonderful Christmastime".

The thing I miss most about how things were "back in the old days..." was when no one was enforcing the copyright to "It's a Wonderful Life". I loved that it was on nearly every channel at random intervals throughout the day. You could flip on the TV and always find it on. You'd catch a few minutes of it here and there, before school or work, when flipping channels before a show you wanted to watch started, you'd see little bits and eventually you'd give in, pull out the TV guide and find a time when it was on and you'd be able to watch it, and finally you'd sit down and watch the whole thing. Some Christmas sweets, a cup of hot chocolate and Clarence earning his wings... It's just not the same when it's barely on TV and I have to resort to buying the DVD to see it. Now I have total control and I completely forget to watch it some years. It was better when it was insidious.

One of my first Christmas-seasons out here, It's a Wonderful Life was playing on TV, which one of our housemates decided to watch, which resulted in the rest of us sort of trickling in to watch it too. Ingmar and one of our other housemates had evidently never seen it before. So all they knew was the "dude tries to kill himself, angel shows up" part. They didn't realize there was a whoooooooooooooole chunk of movie BEFORE that, so they kept asking basically every five minutes, "SO WHEN DOES THIS GUY KILL HIMSELF, JEEZ."

I believe you may have misspelled 'Mad Elf. It is the most glorious of Christmas beers. One is delicious. The second is even better, but makes you think the third is a good idea. It goes rapidly downhill from there.

As far as the holidays themselves go, we drive up to my mom's in MA and have a super-relaxing time where we cook a ton, serve dinner for 8-10 family and friends, give each other nice presents that don't involve any gift certificates, and relax.

She lives on Martha's Vineyard, which is both stupendously gorgeous in the winter and very quiet when the tourists have gone home.

It is basically perfect.

I was raised Christian, and I liked Christmas carols when I was a kid. I'm no longer religious, and Christmas music drives me up the wall now, mostly because I've heard the same stuff year after year. So you're not alone in hating it.

It probably didn't help that I worked retail for two and a half years. On top of the customers, we had endless Christmas muzak piped in through the speakers, and since the store I worked for was in a mall there was no way to turn it off.

Earplugs seem to be a must this time of year.

I really like Christmas (two weeks off work huzzah!) but hate the fact that every year that we decide to spend it with Dan Lawrence's parents the train companies decide to do rail replacement works on their line.

I hate everything about this post.

In response to the OP, I was going to link to a study showing that suicide rates go up during the holidays, but instead I learned something new.

http://www.med.nyu.edu/content?ChunkIID=156980

Yeah suicide is generally after the holiday, especially if said holiday was spent with the bare minimum or lack there of family.

I don't know if /how I am doing christmas this year. I wanted to have one , and as it approaches the memories are getting to me. I kinda knew christmas was doomed for a few years after a particularly terrifying phone call last year.

This will be the first year that holidays for my side of the family are entirely me. Since my side consists of me, and my son.. I think I will let Loon's side cope with it.
...
On subject more, I never really hated christmas. I have been mildly celebrating solstice since I was 15 so the whole christmas part is more a family gathering bit. I did retail, but as mall clean up. I worked countless hours in food service on christmas eve. It was always a good day, it ment I had a guaranteed day off. When I worked tech support it ment I got overtime+ holiday pay for doing next to nothing since the phones wouldn't ring. So I hold nothing against the season in general.

No... that link (and others I stumbled across) specifically address that. There isn't a statistical rise after the holiday period, either.

I love Christmas! I always have, and it got even better after my daughter was born. One advantage we have is that we have no family to speak off, so we don't have the stress of the large family gatherings. It's just the three of us hanging out all day in our pyjamas :D
This year is a bitter-sweet though. My daughter is 12, almost 13 and still firmly believes in Santa. Since she's going to secondary school next year I'll have to tell her the truth after this Christmas, and it's bitter-sweet to watch her writing her letter to Santa for the last time and so on.
There will still be presents on the tree next year, but probably no more toys as she gets older. So we're making the most of it this year!

What do you mean "tell her the truth"? Every year my mum asks me if I still believe in Santa, and every year I say yes and he shows up! Funny how he's always used the same wrapping paper my mum buys though...

I stand corrected. Gremlins is, indeed, a great Christmas movie.

This sounds like a job for the forum beer exchange!

But yeah, I was going to pick some up soon anyway, so I'll pick up extra and we'll work something out.

MY MOTHER DOES THIS TOO. OH GOD WHY.

There isn't enough punch in the world.

To be fair, she doesn't watch all 24 hours - she just wants it on since she's cooking and chasing her grandkids around and making sure the dog stays out of the appetizers, and if it's on all day she'll catch enough of it to equal a viewing or three.

And we change it to football when she's not in the room anyway.

I love the holidays. Always have, hopefully always will. My mom hates them and she's always telling me that one day I will too. I'm just glad that day hasn't come yet.

I mean, I can see where she's coming from. The holidays are always when the really awful family problems happen. But that's not a necessary part of them. And besides, it's the ambiance I love. Like taking a chilly walk in the ravine on Halloween before going home and watching scary movies. You don't really have to do anything extravagant to get some enjoyment out of the holidays. One of my favourite things to do is go downtown to the Eaton Centre and walk through the crowd and people-watch. There's a different energy during the holidays, and it makes me irrationally happy.

I'm trying to hone in a little on what exactly bothers me about the holidays these days. For one thing, they're disruptive. From Thanksgiving to New Year's, it's harder to maintain one's routine, and things sometimes peter out during the holidays and don't come back at all.

For another, the holidays are almost entirely retail-driven, which is why you start hearing Christmas music and seeing decorations before Halloween is even in the rear-view. At least in the States, retail businesses start trying to brainwash us into getting in the mood for shopping earlier and earlier every year, manufacturing cheer where it doesn't exist.

I understand your other complaint; it's fairly common. But I'm not clear what you mean here. What do you mean by "things petering out"? And as for routine being disrupted... isn't that a good thing? I would think that that helps you break out of ruts.

I'd just like to be clear: I don't have a bone in this fight, nor am I taking a devil's advocate position. I'm just trying to understand.

Routine is comfy!

Around this time of year, folks like to put up little decorative lights around their homes or apartments. As I've lived in some form of either barracks or apartment for half my life, this is something I've never actually done as an adult. And as the resident of a rather nice 107-year-old loft with quite a bit of character yet not a lot of interior light, I thought I'd go the route of stringing globe lights along the exposed rafters, to provide more illumination than my failing eight-year-old floor lamp.

In the words of one Jeremy Clarkson - how hard can it be?

Enter complication the first - 12' high ceilings. That's all right, I have a stepladder!

Enter complication the second - I am shaped roughly like Donkey Kong. Put me up above 6' on a ladder, and physics becomes interesting. Now add in the fun of screwing in small eyebolts to these wooden rafters, and having to move the ladder each time...

Hold on, that takes too damn long. Let's do this the smart way. I'm a reasonably mighty fellow, what if I hold onto the rafter with my big gorilla hands, grip the ladder with my feet, and simply move it to the new position and re-balance myself? Genius, right?

To my credit, I did manage to miss the coffee table when I powerbombed myself off the ladder.

All right, all the eyebolts are in, now it's time to hang the lights, hook up the tapper switch, link everything together... and hope that nothing explodes.




In the words of Nikola Tesla, fiat lux, motherfuckers! It's time for some holiday cheer up in this business, and by holiday cheer I mean rum & Dr Pepper as our Founding Fathers intended.

Top-of-ladder physics are the worst physics.

I'm hoping they get fixed in the next patch.

You are a terrible human being.

That it is. Unfortunately, though perhaps only in my experience, it tends to get disrupted rather easily. I don't have anything against a routine, but I also like to improvise when necessary when stuff hits the fan and fails to get spread out evenly.

It's been my experience that whatever momentum you might build toward something worthwhile sometimes gets completely derailed by the holidays. Two examples from my own experience: a diet and a band I was in that was starting to go well until the holidays hit. Sure, MAYBE they can be picked up again, but it's harder than if they'd never stopped in the first place. And by what? A somewhat arbitrary set of dates on the calendar and (mostly) other people's expectations that those dates should take priority over what you have going on.

So I assume that all you jerks who love the holidays have warm, WASPy, Norman Rockwell families, who do stuff like love and support each other and who don't constantly find new ways to make each other's life an endless misery? Or perhaps families who's matriarchal structure is not run by bugfuck crazy people?

One of the last Christmases I ever spent at home, when I was about sixteen years old, my mother put small jars of baby food in my and my sister's stockings. Baby food. Nothing else. About four jars each.

My sister and I looked at each other and said, I think sensibly, "What the fuck is this?"

"What?" my mother said. "You used to LOVE those things!"

"But.... we're teenagers now. Why would you think we still eat this?"

"WELL I GOT YOU EACH DIFFERENT FLAVOURS!" she screamed, and then locked herself in the bedroom and proceeded to yell how she was going to kill herself for the next four hours or so.

So, yeah. Have fun with your stupid holiday. I'll be spending December 25th the way I always do: Wondering why I haven't gone to therapy yet.

I like the time off and visiting my family. I loath the consumerism, ridiculous crowds, and nasty traffic in cold weather.

Fuck the TBS A Christmas Story marathon, but God bless the Sci-Fi Channel SyFy New Year's Eve Twilight Zone marathon. RIP, Comedy Central's MST3K Turkey Day marathon.