Christmas Blues

I really hate Christmas.  I enjoyed it as a child, but as an adult it is a time of year I truly dread.  People often ask me why; it seems strange to them that I should have such negative feelings about a holiday most people enjoy.  My dear friend, the Little Pecan, wrote a set of blogs recently that have clarified the foundation of my distaste.  You can read them here, here and here.  Interestingly enough, in them she explains why she celebrates and enjoys Christmas.  Though what she pointed out may be the foundation of my feelings about Christmas, there are also layers on top of that.

As stated, I enjoyed Christmas as a child.  It was fun, spending time with family, picking out presents for other people, receiving presents, eating too many special holiday goodies, getting time off from school.  It was great, all of the enjoyment, none of the responsibility.  Strangely enough, although my family claims to be Christian, the only nod to religion at Christmas was the nativity scene on the mantlepiece.

As I got older and started hearing more about the "keeping Christ in Christmas" thing and whatnot, I was like, sure, okay, Christmas is a time for celebrating family and friends.  That's Christian, isn't it?  Which probably shows that I was never particularly religious.  I'll explain a bit of my relationship with religion:

My family claimed to be Christian, but we never attended church regularly.  I was sent to a strict Christian school for my elementary years because they had a good academic curriculum and my mother wanted me to have a good education.  In school we had chapel service and everything, so I was more than exposed to religious beliefs.  Some people think that children believe wholeheartedly and without question, but I was not one of those children.  I was plagued with doubt at the inconsistencies of Christianity until I got older and realized that I had never truly believed in God. 

However, I respect that other people do.  Celebrating the birth of Christ is something that Christians like and that's cool.  But where is this celebration of Christ?  Hell, where is the celebration of friends and family?  What I see is more of a celebration of the shopping mall driven by the majority of people who claim to be shopping because of their love of Jesus?  What does rampant consumerism have to do with the birth of a baby in a barn a couple thousand years ago?  I don't get it.  However, not celebrating Christmas is treated as both un-Christian and un-American.

Religion aside, society still expects me to participate in the holiday season.  My loved ones, both religious and not, celebrate this time of year.  And I feel pressured to participate as well.  I normally don't cave to peer pressure, but in this case it overwhelms me from all sides.

I cave to the pressure, and go through the stress of frantic gift buying or gift making, frantic visits with everyone I can possibly make time to see, and generally never get a chance to actually relax and enjoy the holidays.  There is nothing fun about it for me.  I don't even really enjoy receiving gifts anymore, because they make me feel immense guilt that I am poor and cannot afford to purchase gifts for everyone.  I make gifts for people, and although I personally love handmade gifts, I am always worried that people will look at the things I make and give to them as "less than".  So it becomes a time of year that points out my lack of financial success as well.

But I do it year after year because I WANT to enjoy it.  I want to purchase gifts for my loved ones to show them how much I appreciate them.  I want to spend time with those loved ones, and celebrate the ending of one year and the beginning of another.  I really do, it's just Christmas never seems to work out that way.  I keep doing the same thing every year expecting a different result.  It exemplifies insanity that I cannot break or change.

And so I hate Christmas.