So excited! I love Christmas anyway, but this year will be my first hot one. We’re packing up the five year old and the five month old and taking them to Australia to meet their dad’s family. Tiny matter of 24 hours travelling each way, plus the wedding we’re going to which will also be attended by my very estranged mother-in-law, but other than those minor details, it’s going to be fabulous. I also get to do an early mini-Christmas with my family here before we go, so that’s even better.
Don’t celebrate Christmas, and annoyed seeing the Christmas decorations in the stores.
Some good memories of Christmas of old, but enough bad memories that I was quite willing to chuck the whole event.
Decided to celebrate “Happy New Year” instead. Family event to make poster for the new year, New Year’s Eve afternoon movie and family fun at home (beating on pots and pans at midnight!). Exchanged gifts on New Year’s Day.
Now listen, I don’t want to jump all over you, and I answered in the ‘I’m a total X-mas Spaz!!’ category, but coming into a thread where people are lamenting the fact that they don’t enjoy x-mas because their mom just died, or their entire family is out of work and on food stamps and suggesting that they just need to REACH FOR what they want is…well, totally obnoxious, actually.
I lost my dad at X-mas last year. I’m still excited about the holiday because of my son, but believe me, if reaching was all it took for me to have another x-mas with my dad I would be all over it. Sadly, life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes people are allowed to be bummed about shit and you’re in no place to give them grief for it.
Good grief! It’s not even November yet. Wait until after Thanksgiving.
Couldn’t care less, bored, I’ve gotten excited more about toe fungus. Unlike relentless Christmas sales, toe fungus can be sort of interesting once in a while.
The only fun things about Christmas are that I can listen to and sing dirty carols while writing stories about Santa getting kidnapped by terrorists. (My one fantasy that makes me wish Santa was real.)
Go ahead and jump. I’m always ready to learn. I wasn’t trying to give anybody grief, I was trying to help lift them up. I’m tactless, I know. Wish I could be better, and I DO try sometimes, but it’s not my nature and takes effort. My second name is Patience. And my first name is No.
But…
I know loss. And I know if it doesn’t kill you, you have to go on. And I hoped I was turning on the flashlight to show a (one) way.
I do see that my words were minimalizing some peoples’ pain, and I’m sorry for that. We all have a whole lot of living to do and I just hate to see some of it spent on feeling bad. But I know healing takes time.
Do you know how long it took me to write this? Because I’m trying not to be obnoxious.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I cared about Christmas. I can’t recall the last time my husband and I exchanged gifts. I don’t know when it ceased to be fun. I haven’t set up a tree in at least 8 years. We’ve never decorated this house.
Spending it with my side of the family is noisy and stressful. Spending it with my husband’s side of the family means driving over 800 miles to see them. Frankly, I’m just looking forward to January.
I don’t exchange gifts, I get a week off work and I don’t spend enough time in stores to be annoyed by any sort of music or decorations, so I’m excited for Christmas.
Not “omg omg omg!” excited but looking forward to taking a break.
Oh yeah and my niece is 2 now so I guess she’ll be excited about Christmas. I guess I gotta get her something. I look forward to building her a snow fort!
EXTREMELY. I don’t celebrate Christmas but I do love a good shoe sale. 
Go to the dollar store, grab a few things. Wake them up on Dec 25 and SMILE. Put your name on a gift list. They’ll appreciate it.
When I was super broke a few years back I was struggling during Hanukkah. I worked a a teacher’s assistant and our breaks weren’t paid. It was also my son’s birthday. 8 gifts + a birthday? I went broke going to the Dollar Store and the grocery store for cake supplies, but I did it. Barely. I had thirty bucks. We also colored and watched TV together and drug out blankets and pillows and had a ‘sleepover’.
And he still has no idea it was *that *hard on me.
Just love your kid and be excited for them. It helps.
A friend who shares my sentiments ordered a couple of these for us last year.
I am Christian, but my views on Christmas are different from most, so I don’t celebrate Christmas. I generally feel somewhere between the first and second options for not celebrating it, but probably closer to the second, so I voted that one.
I haven’t celebrated it for a several years (maybe 7 or 8) and was, at most, lukewarm for several years before that. Yet, every single year, the same people who are fully aware of the fact that I don’t act surprised that I don’t and start an argument with my about why I’m wrong and how I’m offending them and all kinds of obnoxious and ironically selfish gibberish. I understand it’s a strong part of our culture, I don’t get bothered when random strangers say Merry Christmas or whatever. But, seriously, it’s bloody annoying as hell to have the same argument, like I don’t know why people celebrate it, as if I somehow forgot how I was raised or don’t understand that people like certain parts about it. It’s also annoying that, despite reminding people every year that I don’t celebrate it and that I don’t want them to get me any gifts, people still get me stuff and then act all sad when I’m not filled with joy or whatever that they aren’t respecting me.
Almost as bad, for like 3 months of the year, it’s the same dozen or so Christmas songs playing over and over in every single store, everywhere. Despite not celebrating Christmas, I do, in fact like some songs associated with it, but so much overplay just makes them grating. And, of course, the decorations and the comercials and that I can’t even do normal errands without so much over-crowding in the stores is equally annoying.
The positive part about it is that, because people travel to celebrate it, I do often get to see family I don’t get to see the rest of the year around Christmas, but even that is often tarnished with random guilt trips or whatever.
So, yeah, Christmas season is pretty annoying. If I could just get through one year with people not pestering the hell out of me about it and not trying to force me into traditions that I have personal objections too, maybe I could be mostly neutral to it like I’d like to be.
Because some people are all brainwashed by glurge-y Christmas TV shows, like the Christmas-hating Scrooges are made to see The Error of Their Ways. Like Christmas Miracles really exist. The heavens are going to part, a ray of light will come down, you will realize materialism is unimportant to the True Meaning of Christmas, that it’s your loved ones who really matter. You will all sit down to the big Christmas feast and just glow, bathed in the light of love, the Reason For the Season. … Excuse me, please, this is one of the things that bugs me the most. The commercials, the movies, the whole Christmas thing in the media, and if you don’t live up to it, there’s something wrong with you. Try as I might, I have never had a Martha Stewart Christmas with a Norman Rockwell family, it’s just depressing, exhausting, enervating - all that forced proximity with people you do love, but you have to travel hours in bad weather and you have nothing to talk about, and you overspend, it’s sadder and emptier every year, and it’s just…no. I just steel myself to just do it, one step at a time, get through the day without some family crisis (or fight), be pleasant at all costs, be helpful, and the relief I feel going home is almost worth it.
I’m a little excited, but I have a self-imposed rule (ok, my husband also enforces it) about having no decorations or really talking about Christmas much until after December 1st, unless it’s things like booking a hotel for a family event or somesuch (which isn’t happening this year). I’m a little annoyed at seeing the Christmas things in the stores already, since we still haven’t had Hallowe’en, but I’m excited about Christmas itself.
My best friend just confirmed that she’d be back in Canada (she lives in the UK) just after New Year’s and so our annual “Christmas” dinner with friends will take place in early January this year. I can’t wait!
That’s me. As a non-religious, non-holiday person with no family, I couldn’t care about Christmas one way or the other–I am very glad others are enjoying it, but by the time I have endured *months *of music and lawn decor and TV specials, yes, I will be heartily sick of it.
But for that one day off from work? It’s a fair trade.
I don’t know what I want to do for christmas.
I’m also an atheist and I will give presents and cook food, and bake treats but I don’t especially feel like decorating because I don’t want to have to take it down and put it away. I hate winter and snow, give me palm trees and sand any TIME.
I could send cards too, because all i would need is a few stamps. I like getting cards.
I just don’t want to hassle with the vast collection of family xmas bric-a-brac. I was talking to my housemate and she wants a snowman shower curtain and I wanted to barf.
I like Christmas. Scandinavians do Christmas right - between the big day and New Year’s, everything slows down, so you can continue to eat too much, spend time with the people you want to spend time with, and play with your presents. That’s good.
But last I checked the calendar still said October. It is at least three or four weeks too early for the stores to be stocking Christmas this and Christmas that. So at the moment, color me annoyed.
I just bought two Christmas music CDs. Michael Buble and Zooey Deschanel.
Unfortunately I’m not overly impressed with either one of them; especially Michael Buble’s “Santa Buddy” take on Santa Baby. ecchhhh
I’ll jump on board with a ^ this.
Seriously, we have 2 major holdays before Christmas.
I’m horrified such a thing exists.