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.

one word summer

yes I live in the south hemisphere

My stepdad died 2 days after Christmas. Kinda permanently ruined the holiday for me

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.

Working at the post office does seem like an especially shit job. That would probably
sour my outlook on the “merry” time, too.

Well, it’s the darkness that comes living near the arctic circle, that shit makes me question my will to live every year by itself. Thankfully we are not on the northern side, meaning that we get that sweet 4-6 hours of daylight this time of year before the sun sets again.

The christmas stuff starts creeping in to the stores before Halloween, even though Halloween isn’t something that’s a familiar celebration around here (but we’re a good little vassal state apparently, so whatever). And after that’s over with it’s just more and increasing amounts of christmas stuff. I hate it, it’s just worthless plastic waste that costs an inordinate amount of money because of reasons.

The music that plays on every radiostation and in every store at every time. All the songs are usually just translations of Usian shit jingles, all of which are way too cheerful and really way too fucking American for my taste, and those few that aren’t are just straight up hymns and/or psalms and I really don’t vibe with any amount of religiosity.

It’s a time for family, they say, which to me seems to be a way of guilt tripping me to visit people who stress me most, but feel bad when I immidiately want to leave and just go home.

There is a memory of a christmas here, some kind of an idea. But when I see the soulless eyes of plastic reindeer and hear the cheerless and lifeless jingle of plastic bells in the store where I (and WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE at THE SAME TIME) am franticly trying to find everything that everyone tells me that I need to buy in order to have a merry christmas, I realize that it’s simply not there. It doesn’t exist. Maybe it never did.

I look outside, and instead of the half a meter of snow I remember having fallen by this time of the year in my childhood I usually see a fucking puddle.

Thanks capitalism, you really do ruin everything for the rest of us, don’t you? Yeah you do.

Primitive dogmatism of religion. The capitalism of traditions is terrible too. I have never celebrated it in my life, so whatever from that perspective. As the outsider watching the nonsense, it looks insane, and the way it leads to suicide season in the first quarter that follows is like watching people punch themselves in the face every year. The date of Jesus’s birth is not recorded biblically either. So the entire thing is nonsense and a carryover of far more ancient traditions. Not to mention there is no actual evidence Jesus ever existed. The gospels were written several decades later, and contain lots of errors and copying mistakes like cheating school children if you actually do research into the oldest manuscripts. What remarkable event do you recall accurately several decades later after your entire world is destroyed and you are living in a foreign land as a noncitizen and hated by pretty much everyone around you. You might be able to survive on the tribalistic dogma of the successful few among the diaspora if only you could find a way to sate their desire to believe in something greater than themselves. Even then, no one really cared for nearly three centuries until it became a thing. It was a convenient way of consolidating political power in an age when religion was inseparable from politics and anyone could start some random cult religious movement to gain power. Monotheism made it much harder to use religious populism for power. So I see it as spurious harmful nonsense from top to bottom and every level in between.