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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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