For those that can’t stand this time of the year, my misery seeks company. What does it for you?
For me: aside from the usual family stuff:
I worked front-end in a post office back when that meant a line-up before I opened the doors to the end of the day when I had to inform the line-up that was still out the door that, yes, I was going to close on time. (Some didn’t take that well. For me it was just another Tuesday…)
It meant a lot of work with little thanks and I had to listen to the same shitty Xmas playlist over and over all day.
Edit/PS: The quick downvote sells it. Perfection. chefs kiss
All fake ,and biggest scam still around in 2025
If there was no religious connotations and the gift giving shit was done away with I wouldn’t mind.
I do like how entire communities get together and do the same things like light up the streets with Christmas lights and all follow a nice theme.
But I prefer Halloween due to the lack of religion and the only expectations are to give out candy to children.
I think I’ve come around to preferring Halloween in a way. It’s not a big thing in Australia (though I feel it’s growing) and a lot of people whinge about it being American. I don’t really participate in Halloween but the core thing here is just people having fun. And I can get behind that.
Cat died on christmas.
But also christmas music and consumerism and religion and insincerity and various intersections thereof. And my phone automatically capitalizes christmas no matter how many times I tell it to not do that.
I can like christmas, but I experience an adverse reaction to “Christmas”. Call me a kringlephobe idc
The unrelenting mandatory consumerism just sucks all the joy out of today. I’ve been stressed all month about this and can’t even enjoy it until it’s over.
Christmas meant ‘family coming together’.
If you don’t agree with your family, then what’s left?
The family you choose? Aka friends
the stupid outfits and people telling me i need to like it
I mean it’s a good reminder that I’m not really part of my biological family anymore
I’m sorry your bio family aren’t better people. I hope you’ve found better quality humans to call your family.
from 9-19 every holiday started off with my father and mother being passive-aggressive with each other. this usually continued until dad grew frustrated and began to yell or scream at me. why he targeted me I don’t know. there were two other kids. probably because they were older and would throw his shit back at him.
one year in particular he screamed at me to go burn the trash (as one did in the rural days). it was fall and was very windy. I told him it would catch the yard on fire. “just do it!” fine…
I took it out and lit it. came back inside and went back to my room because I didn’t want to get yelled at. keep in mind I was around 11 years old at the time. about 30 minutes later he’s screaming for me. I come out and about an acre of our land is on fire. it was mostly tall (dry) grass. “what’s wrong with you?! are you fucking stupid?!!” we spent the rest of the afternoon fighting the spread of the fire while he berated me. then had a disappointing dinner followed by gifts and “love” with messages like, “smile more!” and “is this not good enough for you?”
that was the day I lost all respect for my father. that was the day I stopped trusting adults.
I don’t share this to gain sympathy. I fucking hate sympathy, frankly. I share this as a cautionary tale for adults today. don’t mistreat your kids. when you’re on your deathbed, these are the things that will haunt you, and you’ll be alone to suffer without closure as your vision simply fades out to nothing.
Merry fucking Christmas.
That it’s so incredibly hyped up. You start hearing music and seeing ads and decorations for it too early. Black Friday is a complete shitshow.
Holiday travel sucks, and the possibility of shitty weather is rather high. I avoid traveling for holidays, but I’ve had to travel around Christmas for work and it is a mess.
The expectation of gift giving. I’m big into anti-consumption and don’t want to buy or receive a bunch of junk. While this expectation is more of an annoyance to me, it has actual negative impact on people who are struggling financially.
It’s become so commercialized. I’m not religious at all, but it’s become a farce.
I really don’t like getting presents in company. I’m an Autist and don’t react as people would expect, so masking sets in which is very stressful.
so masking sets in which is very stressful.
Pretending to be happy sucks. (…the energy right out of me.)
Mimicking looking happy and grateful.
“Say cheese!”
“Why?”
“Because it makes you look like you’re smiling.”
“Oh…”
Yeah that’s where the misunderstanding starts. Meta style!
Not every Autist is identical (or rather everyone is wildly different) . I mostly have no issues understanding things like that and I can be a master of sarcasm. However this makes it all the worse when it hits and flies over my head with random other stuff: but that was so obvious. Sigh.
I’m (probably) not an autist, but same all around. Hate watching people open my gifts as well because I feel like I’m pressuring them to act a certain way. Exchanging gifts is miserable.
Now take that discomfort and dial it up a few hundred percent, maybe throw some resulting body issues in there and being ill a week thereafter.
The point I am often trying to make is: the separate issues are sometimes easy to understand (and that’s good) but the resulting issues are underestimated because of this.
Please do not take this as a aggression to your valid post, but I often feel this needs to be added.
Me sharing my discomfort was not intended to discount yours. But in the same vain, don’t discount my feelings either.
Oh, nono. All fine! It was not meant that way.
However, vein. Scnr 🤣
My in-laws are the absolute worst with this. Everyone sits in a circle and opens gifts one at a time. Makes my anxiety spike just thinking about it.
Are there any holidays or celebratory rituals you do like?
Well it also has its advantages. People are on vacation and in general it’s less busy so that’s an advantage.
Anything where I can just be. There’s no fixed time for that.
I hope you get some being time for yourself then!
Thanks!
The “less busy” thing varies by location.
Where I live easter is a real shit show. We’re just over-run with people visiting from out of town. I always thought it would be a daft time to go visit the city or something but… turns out everyone has left the city to come visit my town.
Yes, of course. Munich is mostly always busy so I’m lucky (and also chose to and of course it would also be more expensive) not to live in the center.
An avocado, thanks…
i hate the ultra consumerist version and the jesus version for different reasons
i hate having to come up with ideas on what to buy for people who already have everything. all just because we are brainwashed by capitalism
I mainly just focus on buying people nice edible treats. Biscuit boxes, chocolate, turkish delight, fancy coffees or teas.
I buy experiences and consumables. No more stuff.
I’m kinda done with it taking up a third of the year. You start seeing Christmas decorations and shit hit store shelves before Halloween.
When my dad was a kid, my grandparents did absolutely nothing for Christmas - no decorations, no tree, etc - until Christmas Eve, then they went all out. Then they’d pack it all up the day after Christmas. I feel like if the Christmas “season” was only a few days, I’d hate it much less.
I reserve some time between ~Dec 20 and ~Jan 10 for bright colored sweaters, visiting relatives, exchanging gifts particularly for the kids, rich food and strong drink…I live in the Northern hemisphere, it’s the beginning of winter, it’s cold and bleak and the days are short, spend a bit of time doing something to keep your brain inside your skull.
Why are we selling 8 foot tall inflatable glowing candy canes in early October?
I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies (the music especially is just so bad). The “Christmas episodes” TV shows run are so incredibly corny. I find the decorations to be tacky and ugly. I feel like I’m suffocated by so much cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away after the holidays.
I suppose that all wouldn’t be so bad if the “Christmas season” didn’t stretch out for so long. It’s now well underway before Thanksgiving, and I’m being conservative with that. That means at least 10% of the year - so 10% of my life, too - is spent under the Christmas regime.
But on a deeper level, I think it points to a real sickness in society. Capitalism has so thoroughly destroyed our real social connections to each other. It breaks those human bonds and creates atomized individuals who are only supposed to care about themselves. But that’s not who we are as a species - we are social creatures who have a couple hundred thousand years of cooperation with each other in order to survive.
On some level, capital “knows” ripping us away from our social being is not only unnatural, but atomizing us so thoroughly harms social reproduction. Christmas has become a way of resolving this problem. BUT, it’s capitalism… so the solution can’t be something like “give workers the month of December off so people can spend real quality time with each other”.
So capitalism has created this artificial holiday structure where “family”, “giving back”, and “what really matters” is centered, but it’s all done in the most superficial way possible. It’s all kabuki. Capital creates an imitation of social connection and still manages to make it about accumulating more capital. Spend money on presents. Don’t like the commercialism around presents? That’s ok, spend money on airfare or gas to see your family. Use up your meager PTO at the end of the year when it’s slow and costs your boss less. But I think getting workers to spend money is still just the secondary objective of Christmas. It’s much more about getting people to forget how deeply separated we are from each other. To pretend for at least 10% of the year that everything is normal, capitalism is normal and being disconnected from each other is normal so long as you watch a couple movies once a year that are supposed to remind you that “what really matters is family” - the feeling though, not the reality.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
(Copying what I said on the lemmy.ml cross post because I’ve been thinking about this for a while and want to get it out).
Christmas is fine in moderation. The problem I have with Christmas is that people try to stretch Christmas out to have it take over other parts of the year.
I also feel like Christmas is the holiday that requires the most work and I’m not a fan of holidays that require me to do a lot.
Organized religion is a plague.
It’s just a celebration of winter solstice. My family is as atheist as the day is long, but we still enjoy the trappings of Christmas.
I think that was the origins of it and can be celebrated that way.
However, I feel it has most certainly been hijacked by religion and capitalism since then in certain parts of the world.
I enjoy it due to having time off, so I’ll take that :P
