The Holidays

I've been trying very hard to keep up my spirits and not be a grumpy old lady.  Lately, however, I'm feeling decidedly grouchy.  I think it's the holidays.  I hate the whole holiday season.  Halloween and Christmas are for kids, either being a kid or doing for a kid. Not having kids, I find it really unpleasant to watch all this greed. I refer to it as "American Retail Christmas."  It's all about gimme, gimme, gimme. 

Jewelry store commercials are the worst.  They brainwash men into believing that they are bad husbands, boyfriends, sons, fathers and brothers if they are not handing out jewelry to the women in their family every Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Christmas. It's bull shit. Worse, they are teaching women that jewelry is the expected norm.  Do you really want the men in your life to put themselves into senseless debt just because of your greedy expectations? Do you really want a boyfriend/husband that's so financially irresponsible that he would put himself into ruin because he's been bullied by the media to give you jewelry every stupid holiday? How often can you really wear all those diamonds anyway?  You can't wear them to work.  They'll get damaged, lost or stolen. Do you really dress up enough to justify all that jewelry? Then, you have to get extra insurance to cover it all. I am a very pragmatic person, and this is impractical in my book. It's just stupid to me and pisses me off every season.

Christmas is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus. Not in America. Not any more. Jesus is practically being outlawed. It's not a religious event any more. It's about the celebration of greed by the retailers. You simply HAVE to have the latest electronic thingamajig....that costs hundreds of dollars...that will be obsolete in four months. Kids go back to school and ask all their friends, "What did you GET?" "How did you make out?"  How much of that stuff are they still going to be using in two months?  Next time you take a load to Goodwill, notice how much of it is stuff that came into your home as a Christmas gift. You think you want all this stuff, and then when you get it, you find that you have no practical application for it. You set it aside and get on to wanting the next thing that the commercials tell you that you can't be happy until you have one now. 

Before I understood marketing, it didn't bother me as much. I was a sheep being herded just like everyone else.  Now that I know how it works, I find it insulting and degrading. I resent being manipulated on every level. The advertising around the holidays make me feel like I'm strapped to a metal table with electrodes attached to my skull, and the input has been cranked up until it physically hurts. Picture the scene from "A Clockwork Orange."  Merry fucking Christmas.

September 2016 edit:  My favorite book author, Richard Paul Evans addressed this topic in his blog.  He is very PRO Christmas.  So, in the interest of equal time, I'm including his post here:  http://www.richardpaulevans.com/index.php/2015/12/03/stop-whining-that-christmas-is-too-commercial/