Some of us have astigmatism that makes LED lights particularly hard to deal with. I can’t easily read LED signs on the highway unless the letters are really big. I can’t imagine trying to read LED displays in the car.
Very true. I think the reason many adults love Christmas is that it brings back very happy childhood memories, and the reason others hate it is that those expectations are no longer fulfilled unless there are small Santa-believing kids they can share them with, and if your children are now adults or you never had children or don’t have grandchildren, then much of the joy of Christmas is lost. And if life is distinctly more painful than cherished memories of childhood, Christmas brings it into stark contrast. I think I read something somewhere about a general uptick in suicides around Christmas time, and I’m not surprised.
Personally, I’ve grown kinda neutral, from a tremendous fan of celebrating Christmas and family get-togethers and the exchange of gifts and the joy of squealing children and memories of my own childhood, to just not caring much about it any more. I don’t resent it, I just don’t care.
Nope.
Well, the reason I hate Christmas is that it brings back very unhappy childhood memories. The joy of giving, or of children receiving, can’t really mitigate that. It’s a terrible time of year, every year: people just won’t let me opt out.
I’m very sorry to hear that. In a better world, that should never be the case.
An anti-rant on a more mundane topic.
I’m pleased that my new laptop is a very capable media player. But when I plugged it into the TV via the HDMI port, there was a significant amount of overscan (edges of the image being cut off). Which, oddly, was the same problem as with a previous laptop.
I found a very handy website that described two ways to solve the problem, one, with TV adjustments, and two, with adjustments to the laptop scaling, the TV approach being preferred.
By happy coincidence, for the TV solution they used a Sony Bravia – I don’t know if it was the same model as mine, but the remote control was identical. Unbeknowst to me, my TV already had a trivially simple solution to the overscan problem. There’s a selection under the “Display” settings for “True pixels” or “1:1 pixels” or something like that, instead of “Normal”. Lord knows what they think “Normal” means, though ti works fine with my media players. But for the laptop, the “True pixels” setting frames the image perfectly, with no overscan. Who wudda thunk it, that the TV itself could fix the problem?
That sucks, I’m sorry.
I had an unhappy childhood but fortunately my Christmases were pretty good. Unless I’ve forgotten stuff.
Nevertheless, I find parenting my child with the love and care I didn’t get to be deeply fulfilling, all times of year. Christmas is a lot of fun with him. It’s gonna be a hard adjustment when he’s grown.
Yup.
All of us have adverse shit in our lives. Certainly some people much more than some others. But when one’s personal issue happens to be connected to some major cultural event, yeah, you get your nose rubbed in it every year. Which sucketh greatly.
I’m recalling a conversation we all had either this summer or last about some idiot who blew most of his head off with a 4th of July firework while his wife was standing there watching. She’s not gonna have too much happiness every summer as the random booming starts in her neighborhood.
Neither are her pets ( or her neighbors pets ).
( Please, FTLOG, skip the stupid “firecracker” madness/stupidity people. )
Christmas haters will be pleased to know that, around here at least, the weather forecast is distinctly un-Christmasy. Christmas Eve will be sunny and unseasonably warm. Christmas Day will be warmer still, with a 40% chance of rain. Santa had better put wheels on his sleigh, or make sure to extend his landing gear.
Today, of course, since the Weather Gods know that I need to go out to stock up on supplies before the Christmas madness, we’re supposed to get a nice snowfall. 
Right now it’s sunny but I’m stuck here waiting for the Amazon delivery.
I just looked at the Christmas weather forecast for my area.
Holy moley - it is supposed to be 54 F (12/13 C).
And a few degrees warmer the following day.
Same pattern here, though slightly cooler. But not only will there be no snow, any remaining snow on the ground will melt. The weather forecast isn’t always accurate, but the movement of a major warm front is reliably predictable.
Yay! The Amazon van is just a few stops away. It’s shown on the map as a Santa sleigh! I’ll shortly be able to leave for my mega-shopping spree.
I used to have a very hard time in November and on Thanksgiving Day because of past associations. So I decided I needed to spend that day with my Aunt, who witnessed a lot of stuff I went through and went through her share of stuff. I’d take the six hour drive with my husband and we’d hang out with her, my uncle and my Grandma, very low key. At some point the conversation would turn to my mother and there would be some catharsis there but overall it was a nice time.
Flash forward several years, my son is five. It is now an annual tradition to spend the lowest-key Thanksgiving with my Aunt, Uncle and grandmother. We usually just hang out and talk while my uncle and my son run off to do things on the computer - they are peas in a pod, those two. After the boy is in bed, we talk and watch adult stuff on TV. Rather than something I dread, it’s become an anticipated event. This past Thanksgiving we barely even thought about my Mom. There was one conversation about how we barely even thought of her any longer. It lasted about five minutes.
I’m not saying the separation from my mother isn’t ever painful, but I’m a little bit proud of how I managed to turn a difficult holiday into my favorite one, just by redefining it on my own terms. It used to be I was in really rough shape from the end of October through Thanksgiving. I would have to take time off work just to cope. Last year I stopped reacting and started real grieving. It was a very painful week, but I was doing the work of letting go. This year I forgot I was supposed to be upset until Thanksgiving was already over.
Hooray for progress!
Santa is lost. His sleigh was on my street a few minutes ago, and now it’s on some other street, and apparently doubling back. But hark! I hear the hoofbeats of reindeer! 
I had considered getting a robotic litter box, as well as the possibility of putting some sort of seat to avoid having to bend over. However, this would still require me to have the existing packed liter boxes cleared out.
BTW, yesterday morning I went on NextDoor and posted an explanation of my plight, asking for suggestions on getting the litter boxes cleared out. Within an hour I had two offers to come over and bag the boxes and take them to the dump. One of them will be here at noon today.
Cute with the sleigh.
Today is very Christmas-like weather here. In fact all week is about the same. High of 78-80 / 26-28 and mostly sunny. No ranting about that from us locals. Or the tourists.
I would miss real seasons and snow, but sometimes I’m jealous of your weather. Today was not particularly cold, but sufficiently windy that the wind chill was enough to make me curse out loud in the supermarket parking lot. To anyone nearby, it would have been a variant of “old man yelling at clouds”, namely “old man yelling at the weather”!
My mega-shopping spree was only partially successful. I went to the more distant supermarket because they have great prepared foods, and I did pick up some nice stuff, some of which I’m freezing, including a festive turkey dinner. This is the place with their own stone pizza oven, a hot buffet and a soup stand. And yes, I got a slice of their great pepperoni pizza, too. Something about the crust of their pizzas is just heavenly! Sadly, no clam chowder today at the soup stand, but got Forest Mushroom soup.
There is still stuff on my list to get from the local supermarket, like their nice store-brand beer-battered haddock, but after the big shopping spree at the other store, stocking up on a major liquor supply, and also having to stop for gas (first fill-up for the new car!) I’d about had it for the day and will leave that for next week.
Well, I’ve been grumpy about attending the big extended family Christmas party, and things came to a head today. Because our pilot light went out and I discovered that while trying to bathe my son, before I had myself gotten a chance to shower, which means we’d show up very late if we waited for the water to heat and me to shower, and my husband said, “You’ll just have to get ready very quickly,” and I blurted, “I don’t even want to go!”
Which became a whole thing of, “Then why did you agree to go?”
“Because you always guilt me into it. When we moved here you said I only had to attend these things once in a while. I just attended a huge fucking event for your grandmother and I never enjoy myself at these things, ever. Which you know and earlier this year, you said it never dawned on you that I had sensory overwhelm with these events, but you understood now, but there you went, pressuring me to go to another party that I will not enjoy. So I suppress my feelings about it to try to make you happy, and I probably wouldn’t have said anything if the stupid pilot light didn’t go out.”
He’s not thrilled with me right now, but I’m not going, and we’ll hash this out later. I’m already attending an event with his family on Christmas Day, which I’m also not dying to go to, but it will be smaller and I’ll live. I don’t dislike most of these people, but I fucking hate parties like this, and I resent being related to so many people. It’s exhausting.
I’m trying to enjoy my break and I’m feeling increasingly like I have no space to breathe. I’ve been cleaning and doing housework non-stop since Friday. Everything is booked solid all week. Our Date Day got annihilated by various commitments including our son’s ADHD evaluation and we’ll be lucky to make it to the restaurant on time, but we’re rushing through even our meal to try to get back to daycare in time to pick up my son.
Once we get hot water back, I’m going to take a shower and then play some video games. There may be hell to pay later but I’m so stressed out at this point I’ll deal with it later.
Something I’ve never said aloud in Real Life, but it’s safe to unload on you lovely virtual people:
You know that thing where you go around the Thanksgiving table and say what you are most thankful for that year? My instant, never to be said, thought the last four years: I’m Thankful my mother-in-law finally died. The woman was the bitterest, most hateful and racist person who ever lived. She turned every holiday gathering into “walk on eggs around me or I will turn the occasion into a screamfest that will have repercussions for weeks afterward” and hubby just didn’t see it, or refused to.