Is it just my circle, or has it been a challenge getting into the Christmas/holiday spirit the last couple of years?
Sure, the first year (or two) of COVID were wretched, but most of those barriers have since cleared — yet I’m still struggling. I’ve noticed the same with a number of people within my family and neighbourhood.
How are others feeling? Are you struggling, yet succeeding? If so, how are you breaking through?
Looks like it will be a BROWN Christmas here this year. Which is a grim fucking reminder that we've fucked the planet and it is only going to get worse.
Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong things? Christmas, for me, is a time to show my family that I care for them. Yes, through gifts, but also through time spent with them. It’s a chance to speak others’ love language. For me, doing things for others is how I really feel better about myself.
I was forced to realise before covid, that my family is dysfunctional and delusional. This obviously extends to family events such as Xmas.
I lost interest many years ago in the whole theatrics of it, it’s a capitalist holiday and nothing more. My family touts that “it’s about the thought and the people” when in actuality it’s always been about the gifts (and by extension, money spent).
With that said, covid caused a pause in a lot of said family relations, and that was the straw that broke the (camel’s) back. Most of my family is now rarely in contact, and Xmas as a family event finally bit the dust.
I’m on top of the world, and there’s still money in my wallet, as well as less familial bullshit.
Was just talking about this with a coworker yesterday. They’d noticed that in their neighborhood, the amount of decorations out were even less than the year before. No one left the area, just not putting stuff up anymore.
This is something I’ve felt more and more every year for all the holidays in the areas of the US I frequent. Halloween, Xmas, Easter, etc.
The stores are all decorated earlier than ever, but neighborhoods are barren.
I understand money is tight for many, but Christmas lights are pretty cheap and most people have old sets, it’s not like they’re consumable and need to be replaced every year. I wonder if people are just over it, don’t have the time, lack the spirit, or what.
I say all this as someone who hasn’t decorated for any holidays lately myself.
Because what is the point? I only bother with decorations because I have kids. After they grow up I won’t bother. Also yeah I don’t particularly want to get into it because it feels like I am taking the Christian’s side. They are sitting there putting women in jail for having miscarriages maybe I don’t want to associate with them even slightly.
Xmas 2020 with all the "shortages", at the Target and WalMarts near me the holiday aisles was very scant, and practically completely picked over by the week before. I had genuinely hoped that could have been an eye opener for America.
My cousins have upped this game. They have toddlers. Starting in Feb, they begin stealing back the least popular toys and hiding them in the attic. Then they regift them back to the kids next Christmas. They only buy a couple new items every year.
It reduces clutter in the house and will probably work until around 6, when they plan to shift from regifting to donating.
I assume most do. No I am not going to spend hours trying to remember some cheap plastic thing I bought a decade ago from the dollar store but if it’s fine sure I put it away for next year
They have actually found way of making some of them so that they ether don’t leave needles around or if they do that needles are soft. Super nice, it has been our tree type of choice for a few years now.
I mean, the point of the special is to find meaning in the holidays regardless of the rampant consumerism, but the impact of the message is dampened a bit by Hallmark putting out new charlie brown Christmas tree ornaments every year.
That said, it’s also okay not to have holiday spirit if you don’t find anything about this time of year meaningful. For many who aren’t practicing Christians, it’s a time to be with family because most companies tend to give days off anyway, but for those of us who have cut ties and don’t see the significance of decorating and whatnot, it’s perfectly fine to enjoy the time off without feeling festive.
It was a favorite of mine as a kid. For me, all the nativity reminds me of the war in Gaza and the Christian Nationalist movement infecting the US government and stripping away civil rights.
Generally the high extinction risk from compound crises (climate, plastic, etc.) has dispelled any notion that what I do here or happens to me matters at a greater scale.
If I ceased to exist this moment, it might cause a small amount of local harm, but little wake. These days, I’m a practicing absurdist, mostly that means I’m aware of my grief and dispair in fine detail, a geographic manifold I’ve well explored.
Ignorance and Want are no longer child wretches hiding in the fold of the robes of a Christmas spirit, rather now have become massive kaiju thundering across the countryside ravaging the population with withering gaze and breath of biting hyperborean frost, leaving a path of toxic wasteland in their wake.
I lost my dad to cancer about two week before last Christmas. And my birthday is a few days after Christmas as well. I'll be damned if I ever feel like celebrating Christmas or my birthday ever again
I lost my sister suddenly 2 days before Christmas in 2008. The joy came back — after a fair amount of therapy and contemplation — and over time, life grew around the gaping hole.
A couple of quotes that I keep near me:
Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Mark Manson
When you dull pain and hide it from yourself, you dull your joys as well.
Robin Hobb, Fool’s Fate (Tawny Man #3)
All the best for this holiday season, and all the ones that follow.
Gotta have opposites, light and dark and dark and light, in painting. It’s like in life. Gotta have a little sadness once in awhile so you know when the good times come. I’m waiting on the good times now.
So it’s felt like this to me basically since I became an adult. For one, I work in an industry where the holidays mean nothing. And two, now I have adult shit to do, so there isn’t a ton of time to just sit around baking and watching Christmas specials and what not. Also can’t really stand the consumerist side of things and while I do like giving gifts as a thing, I don’t like the idea of “just buy some shit” or “whoever gets the most presents wins.”
Now all that said, when I think back to what used to make the holidays special for me, I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you’re probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like “Bake cookies/Watch ‘The Grinch’” into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.
I think this also helps a lot with other people, or in my case, my kids. I don’t have a ton of friends (I’m very much a person with a small circle, but all people i know I can call if i need help moving if that makes sense) but we do some small get togethers. With my kids, I try to do more of the things that make things feel special for them. Lights on the house I could take or leave (back to being lazy) but I do my best and I put them up, even though it was just a few days ago because that was the first day that wasn’t pouring where I was at home when it was light out. I make it a point to watch some Christmas movies (and let the kids come to a consensus on which) and bake some cookies or whatever. We usually go every year to that neighborhood where every house has cool lights, even if that is an hour drive away. Lots of little things like that.
Anyway, I feel like the holidays are very much a “fake it til you make it” scenario. I tend to think about it like “what do I remember that I liked about holidays” when I was a kid, and then force myself to do those things. What I’ve generally found is that there are definitely times I’ve regretted not doing anything like that, but I never regret when I forced myself to do something like this, and I rarely remember the “forced” part.
I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you’re probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like “Bake cookies/Watch ‘The Grinch’” into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.
This is the most real advice I’ve seen on Lemmy. It really fucking sucked realizing that no one was going to make things special for me (mostly because I hated the realization that I was expecting someone/something else to make my life more fun). Celebrating holidays and doing seasonal things that are special for the time of year REALLY help break up the monotony of the grind of everyday life (work, kids, bills, house work, ad nauseum). It would be nice to have someone else create that magic for me, but… that doesn’t really happen as an adult. You have to make things fun for yourself, and for others if you can.
Money is time. When you spend all of your time and energy focusing on working, eating, and sleeping because you’re too broke to do anything else, it doesn’t leave you with much time or energy to care about christmas.
definitely. i’m usually dreading the part right after opening gifts. – the whole day feels stagnant and dead, everything is shut, there’s nothing to do but wait for how shitty jan and feb will be. brutal dead awful months
This year has been bad in my area. The cost of living crisis, lots of illness sweeping through, general stress, it’s all meant that no one has really had the Christmas spirit this year. And I’m not talking gifts or anything like that. I’m talking about having hot chocolate, wearing pjs, admiring other people’s decorations.
We’ve all commented that we haven’t been feeling it, and no one can pinpoint why exactly, but I think there’s just too many bad/stressful things going on for people to have the emotional resources left to be positive
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