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The Longest Weekend of the Year

piny

Brownfemipower has posted about her own personal relationship with Santa:

I just want the permission to sit and swear and throw chewed gum at all the happy people wearing bells and green and red sweaters. I want to laugh when my angel gets drunk and farts a wet drunk fart at all the shiny happy people when he bends over to pick up the chips I keep dropping on the floor. I want to flash my five foot long stretch mark infested pancake wanna be breasts at all the cute 20 year olds and scream at them THIS IS YOU IN FIVE YEARS BABY!!!!!!!! I want to sit in the dark corner with other outcasts and rejects and plot the overthrow of Christmas together. I want to be the obnoxiously loud group that everybody rolls their eyes at and wishes wasn’t there–because I’m in just that sort of mood.

Anytime, BFP. It’d be a lot more entertaining than, well, any version of A Christmas Carol that doesn’t star Patrick Stewart (why was he the only cast member with good teeth?).

It’s funny. I’ve never hated Christmas and I enjoyed this Christmas–which is why I decided to post over here instead–but I do usually feel like spending this time of year in bed. It’s not a dislike specific to Christmas so much as a sense that Christmas comes at an inconvenient time. My family seems to feel the same way: tired, chilly, overworked, often sick. So our Christmas tradition is to hole up at home for three or four days, eat a ton of sugar and milk fat, drink a lot of heavily spiked egg nog, and watch stupid–chiefly nondenominational–television until our brains leak out our ears. If we feel up to it, we go and see something awful at the multiplex.

Then, we’re ready to start again.

15 thoughts on The Longest Weekend of the Year

  1. Yes, the holidays, whichever, tend to land in the middle of hibernation, which is bad enough even without a family to visit. It has always been my expressed belief that those holidays only make sense in Oz or elsewhere in the southern hemisphere.

  3. Azundris – YES. I spent the last two Christmases in Oz, and the holidays are so much more pleasant in the summer. (That, and spent with someone else’s family, where if there is a family spat, I’m at least not invested in it in any way. This Christmas, back in the northeast US with my own family, was a bit of a shock.)

    Piny, your family’s tradition sounds blissful. The pressure to have Christmas be An Occasion every year is so exhausting.

  4. I have a tradition of being sick on Christmas. Usually, its stomach flu, but for my older son’s first Christmas (the one you are supposed to make “perfect” and get lots of photos of) I got a charming case of mastitis.

    I had this idea that you had to have these big, larger-than-life Christmases and put all kinds of pressure on myself to do that. I think I literally wore myself out. My older son has autism, and when he came along he couldn’t tolerate all the hectic activity and I so I took a step back and realized he was right. He wasn’t so much intolerant of the activity as the activity was just generally intolerable. We scaled way back. Yesterday, it was my immediate family sitting around watching movies, napping, and having a nice family dinner.

    Once we got realistic expectations, we ended up having nicer holidays.

  5. I know I can’t be the only one who wants to tell all the kids that Santa is not real. I hate the whole Santa thing.

  6. I tend to take the opposite view. It’s true that the Christmas & New Year’s holidays come at a time that is stressful and in which you’re more likely to be sick, and if that makes one just want to withdraw a bit, I totally understand. Having said that, I would say that it’s precisely because it’s during the coming of winter (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) that it’s good to have a festive time. Granted, I have my share of stress too, but the net result is that I have a good time.

  7. I came down with a whopping case of bronchitis and spent Xmas alone in my condo. Now I’m waiting to see the doctor. The only good news is, my company’s new health insurance plan (which came with our new owner) will allow me to keep my current doctor.

  8. There’s no excuse for watching something awful at the multiplex. Christmas falls smack dab in the middle of Oscar-bait season. I saw Sweeney Todd yesterday. There are so many wonderful choices. And seeing a movie on Christmas has the advantage of being tinged with the happy memory of successfully escaping the House of Decibels (as I call it).

  9. For us– my partner of 20 years and our 16 year old daughter, a fabricated but very real family– Christmas is about quality, real quality time together. We have traditions that we build on, we don’t stress, we enjoy. That’s the real meaning of the holidays for us. I think Christmas is what you make of it.

  10. I’ve always loathed this time of year. My childhood Christmases – in fact, my entire childhood – were miserable thanks to my nasty parents. However, since being a parent myself, I’ve grown to love it. I realised that if I let myself look at it through the eyes of my child, I could see magic and excitement and the joy of being with people who love you.

    I still loathe the consumerism, and – being Summer here – the hayfever, but I love the way I can experience the excitement I never had as a child, create the positive family experience I missed out on, and – as commanded by my child – I can play with toys and eat chocolate as much as I like 🙂

  11. Now that I’ve had enough therapy to figure out how to hold a conversation with my crazy parents (and how to deflect them when they start spouting off about how a Prius pollutes more than a Hummer), my Christmases are much more pleasant.

    Though I would like to remind my brother and his girlfriend that if you invite people to spend the day at your house, it’s not very polite to vanish for two hours in the middle of Christmas day and let everyone fend for themselves. Yes, we’re all family, but geez. If you’re tired of having people in your house, don’t insist on having every holiday there!

  12. I hate winter, but I love the winter holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year). I love the big family dinners, traveling to see everyone (or having them come to me) and the whole thing. But it helps that I come from a really huge extended family and we all are close and pretty much all get along wonderfully. Plus, holidays (and once in summer) are really the only times during the year that I get to see everyone that isn’t my mom or sisters, and I don’t get to see them that much more.

    We had a busy, but mostly stress free Christmas. My mom and one sister came up for the weekend, we had a big dinner on Christmas eve and opened gifts, etc., then they left yesterday morning after the kids opened the Santa stuff. In fact, last weekend (husband’s birthday) was way more stressful than this one, because his family came for that weekend and his mother and sister are only good in VERY short doses.

  13. my mom got sick as hell this year, and her boyfriend and i both felt like we might be catching it too, so we managed to duck out of extended family stuff cos we didnt want to get my very frail elderly grandparents sick. instead i went over to my mom and her boyfriend’s place and we ate lasagna my mom and i had prepared before she got sick and brownies i baked and just hung out. it was the nicest christmas ive had, becos it was so low key.

  15. I’ve never hated Christmas and I enjoyed this Christmas–which is why I decided to post over here instead–but I do usually feel like spending this time of year in bed. It’s not a dislike specific to Christmas so much as a sense that Christmas comes at an inconvenient time. My family seems to feel the same way: tired, chilly, overworked, often sick.

    But… that’s why Christmas is at this time of year – it’s cold and gross and miserable and the days we get the least amount of sunlight for the year. Ergo, holidays with an emphasis on lights and food and presents and drinking and general raucousness to help us get through it all.

    A couple of years ago I had trouble getting up the ole “Christmas spirit” because my family doesn’t particularly believe in Jesus (other than that a very nice teacher/prophet lived, historically, but not in a saviour way) and I felt kind of phoney taking part in it all. But then I remembered that Christmas was a actually just a co-opted pagan holiday, and that people have been creating solstice-based holidays for thousands of years, and that by eating and drinking and lighting lights and exchanging presents, I was participating in millenia-old tradition that connects me to a rich human tradition – which ties into my family’s secular-humanist beliefs quite nicely. Enjoy your eggnog!

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