A Grinchy Entry
I can’t tell if it’s just me growing older, if everyone experiences this as they grow older, or if there’s a temporal collective societal phenomenon going on, but each end-of-year, I get a little more disenfranchised with the holidays. It’s still about the only thing I celebrate all year, I enjoy the opportunity to give and receive gifts, the excuse to have particularly good food and splurge a little, the urge to decorate my room in some festive way.
But as far as the reason for the season and all that, I’m finding that the older I get, the more “meh” I am about it. My beliefs are muddled at best, I don’t celebrate a birth, I don’t look for a fat man to shimmy down our fictional chimney, I don’t light nine candles, or four, or five. Instead, my beliefs are based very much in the physical–friends, family, emotional and psychological wealth, material niceties like a roof over my head and enough food to eat. I put up lights because they are pretty, and at what other time of year can you prop up a cut (or barely passable artificial) tree in your living room and not be looked at wierdly?
The commercialism of the holiday has toned down my enthusiasm over the years. Black Friday, when retail stores jockey for the best position to attract your wallet; the same tired tunes playing over the radio, the store musak; gifts and packages of red and green beginning to appear around Labor Day (they don’t even wait for Halloween anymore), the sudden frantic move to place merchandise in places you can’t ignore, and selling out of said merchandise well before the last month of the year. It’s all to make another almighty dollar. Bleah.
Perhaps I feel disenfranchised because I don’t have children. There’re no stockings on the mantle (there is no mantle), I can’t be bothered with a tree this year, I won’t be expecting more than one or two gifts, I don’t get or give cards in the mail. There’s no little ones to foist old, worn myths at, no eager faces waiting for December 22nd or 25th.
The supposed day of celebration will come and go without much acknowledgement from me. It will be another day, I will wake up, I will dink around on the computer, I will rummage around in the fridge for something to nosh on, I’ll regard how cold it is, and wonder if we need groceries or if I need to do laundry.
Eh, perhaps I’d be more enthused about it if I had money to spend on people. I know what I’d get for friends and loved ones if I could afford it, simple things and crafts that don’t cost a lot but even that, I cannot manage just now. I’ll feel bad as those few souls give me something and I have nothing to reciprocate with, other than a self-conscious “thank you.”
I’m just considering, in my own head, what all the fuss is about. I’m more enthused about the Gregorian numbered year changing, than any end-of-year celebration preceding it.
