Holiday Habits and Pleasures

@hifiguy42 

It might be good for you and your family if you re-examine your thoughts and feelings about the Christmas season. I was raised as a Catholic but stopped believing in the "fairytale" as you call it when I was still just a boy. In spite of that, I had wonderful experiences with family and friends at Christmas and carried that through to adulthood. 

I realized as an adult that for me personally, Christmas is about togetherness with family and friends, and a kind of "wrapping up" of the year that's about to end with gratitude and some celebration. If you looked at it in this way instead of as an irrelevant religious celebration, you might learn to enjoy it. The way things are now, your attitude toward the season is probably putting a serious damper on the enjoyment of the rest of your family as well as yourself.

@roxy54, thanks but I'm a very good actor and everyone in my family thinks I'm fine with Christmas. 

All of this originated when we were cowering in caves and realized at some point that winter wouldn't go on forever, so I get that endings/beginnings jazz and it's great for what it is. I am talking about what bothered Chuck and Linus back in '65, and it certainly hasn't gotten better since then. 

I agree with you 100% - enjoying my friends and family is a wonderful thing, and I do. Other than my desire to avoid the whole tree thing, I don't grumble or grouse about it openly and genuinely celebrate the fact that we're all together. I do the same thing on Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Arbor Day, and every Friday fish fry. The beauty of all the other holidays I mentioned is there is none of the insane level of consumerism (and the attendant waste) that Christmas brings. Well, possibly Thanksgiving, but that holiday has a full plate (pun intended) of other issues as well.  

I was in the middle of an extended paragraph that laid out what I believed was a cogent argument about this particular holiday, but I am cool with leaving it at "I love any occasion that encourages time with friends and family"

Or, to return to the words of St.Linus: "peace on earth, good will toward men". 

"The beauty of all the other holidays I mentioned is there is none of the insane level of consumerism (and the attendant waste) that Christmas brings."

True, but Halloween is striving for contention!

@hifiguy42 

I understand your thoughts a little better now. Thanks,

@thecarpathian 

I was thinking the very same thing! It's gone nuts in the last few years. Where do people put all of those headstones and skeletons?