Okay, so Christmas and all those other winter holidays are over. I can’t tell if I’m sad or glad.
I remember when I first became a Christmas Grown Up wherein shopping and gift giving replaced getting presents as the hallmark of holiday excitement. Instead of staying awake at night thinking about that awesome slot car set or my first CD player, I would get so thrilled with being the instrument of happiness in giving gifts that I would constantly drop hints and think about nothing else than how my brother would shit when he opened that custom garden gnome holding a sign with our last name for his new house or the look on my girlfriend’s face when she put on the necklace I picked out as a teenager. Etc. Christmas went from being fun because you were lucky enough to get presents to being lucky enough to give presents. But it still all hinged on shit wrapped in boxes or lazily thrown into those cheesy giftbags.
At some point, though, Christmas became about family and togetherness and traditions and that kind of thing, probably because I spent most of my 20s living far away from all of the people I care about. It became why I would drive for 18 hours through the mountains and snow and traffic without sleep and dodging deer carcasses to see the people I wanted to see, which is no huge deal for me because I do in fact really like my family. At least my immediate family.
But then people get married or engaged or pregnant, and too many families try to still have their same holidays when they are connected to other Family Christmas Networks. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has accidentally gone to someone else’s Big Family Party under the pretense of it being some kind of integrated party that transcends last names and bloodlines.
Everyone has traditions they enjoy, and everyone thinks their holiday awesomeness is more awesome than your holiday awesomeness, and because of the limitations of space, time and our being embodied beings in the world, there’s only so much you can do. So we all take turns giving up what we like to do during the holidays if we’re lucky. If we’re not, we never get to do anything we like to do.
Even when you try to not take a shit all over someone’s party or traditions, you wind up doing it. My youngest brother and I are very particular about Christmas Eve. If anyone trys to mess with it (and people always do), it gets messed up — no matter how good the intentions are or even how much frikkin fun the plans might be. We get pissed and ruin it for everyone. Maybe from rigidity. Who knows? One could argue that our Christmas Eve activities are so long-standing that we’re almost allowed to be rigid and that anyone who knows these plans and trys to change them is a dickweed. I wouldn’t argue it, though, since I realize that we’re not going to get to perform our Christmas Eve rituals much longer and probably, most likely, almost definitely, never again. Even if sitting around watching those stop-motion animation things and drinking coffee is not as fun as some of the stuff people have gotten us to do, we’re pissed and resentful, and we’ll be unhappy on Christmas Eve until we can accept that what we used to like to do is over.
The bad part about traditions: Their rigidity.
Of course, the other bad part that we’ve seen is that traditional people seem to enjoy pushing their traditions on other people, which is of course what my youngest brother and I did to my wife with our favorite mode of Christmas Eve.
So this year, as I was prevented from doing most of the things I like to do, I was pissy and a jerk and overly critical of other people. Then empty. I wondered if I should have a kid soon to recapture some of the “magic” of the holiday season. I don’t know. It might work, but that’s a stupid reason to have a kid in itself.
What I wonder is if it is possible for a creature of habit like me to have a tradition-free holiday without making that a tradition. That would be a fun holiday. At least, with little pressure.
But would it be Christmas without all the annoying things you have to do?
