safe space for ppl who are not in the Xmas spirit but aren't waging "war" on it

it's that weird dead time between christmas and new year's eve, but i'm still hearing xmas music and the holiday sales are still coming at my inbox thick and fast.

i dunno, nuff respect to babby jesus, but i just did not want anything to do with santas and reindeer and enforced sentimentality or cheer this time around. i tried listening to one of buck owens' christmas albums in the car, and the mood soured instantly because there was a bus broken down ahead of us on the two-lane canyon pass and we got stuck in terrible traffic. i tried going to see the holiday lights at the zoo, and the total lack of crowd control gave me an anxiety attack. the one time i actually felt a twinge of something positive was when the carpenters' "merry christmas, darling" came on the radio as i was doing my laundry -- "positive" in this case meaning the kind of sympathetic melancholy that comes from recognizing the dark undertow in karen's voice. and i introduced my bf to bad santa. that was fun. i also quite like the posh english boys' choirs doing somber religious carols in high-ceilinged cathedrals.

this was a terrible year and i'd say that so many of us should be ashamed for succumbing to this coca-cola and ryan seacrest dog and pony show -- but i dunno, maybe some people need the temporary illusion that everything's gonna be okay. and i can relate, sort of. i like batshit-happy pop music. but my illusion comes in three-minute slices rather than these extended periods that just get longer and longer every year.

i read an article confirming that almost all the holiday music we hear out and about is from the forties and fifties, stuff from baby boomers' childhoods. american baby boomers grew up in the most affluent time in our history, and their childhood memories are the stuff of happy and limitless suburban dreams (the white people, anyway, but for the rest of society, even with redlining and shitty Jim Crow laws, there was still a much better safety net than there is now). it's the boomers that decided these songs were immutable classics, that christmas would simply be incomplete without a spiral ham on the table and "jingle bell rock" coming from the home theater system. and it's the conservatism of radio programmers and muzak suits that makes sure the boomers won't be uncomfortable by having to listen to anything more recent than mariah carey or some innocuous cover of "last christmas." so again, it's our parents and grandparents and the fucking "greatest generation" that wrote most of these songs, reminding us that it's their world and we're screwed and we can't afford all the christmas presents we'd like to buy in the mall where this shit is playing because we have none of the union salaries or retirement plans or benefits or GI bill funds that made their lives a goddamn cakewalk.

i want kids to be happy if christmas makes them happy. that's nice. but christmas also brings all these expectations -- whether it's santa bringing them whatever, or a parent coming home from military service, or whether they have enough money or space for a modest little tree with some popcorn strung across it. kids can feel really left out this time of year. (i should know; i'm jewish. not even religious-jewish, so i barely had hanukah either. my holiday season growing up was pretty much a void and it still is. but now i'm indifferent rather than envious.)

chime in so i know i'm not crazy.

i've had a lot of these same thoughts. your 4th paragraph is hideously, painfully otm. the choice of christmas songs seems to be a barely concealed attempt to forget that black people (who aren't nat king cole) ever existed.

or i should say people who aren't white boomers

i don't know why exactly, but once i started missing family christmas gatherings - which weren't all that intensive near the end of my high school years anyway - due to moving away, not being able to travel readily etc., i ended up kind of suspended between wanting to be defiant about not taking part in christmas, and being sad because no matter how much you try you can't escape the sensation of everyone-but-me-is-together. i try to just keep my head down and treat it like any other day, but usually things change too much for that to work. i think social media makes it worse.

i took up frequenting a really chainish coffeeshop near me recently, and they normally have some kind of piped in music running constantly, on a really obnoxious setting where it's simultaneously overproduced, overbearing, and NEW so you can't count on hearing anything familiar and good, but for all of december it was the same exact mix of holiday music - chestnuts that were peppy/muscular enough blended in with like breakbeat-electronica remixes of same and anonymous-sounding nu-holiday music and it was always a little sickening. like, if that is the emotional pitch/frantic state of pseudo-activity required to make the season seem like it's being done right… motherfuckers need to back off. take a breather.

i was lucky enough to spend most of my adult life outside of north america and actively enjoyed christmas just being a day where we took the day off and got fucked up. being back this year, same city as my mom and sister, i was involved in a tense, forced celebration on the 23rd, trying to recreate feelings we had when we lived in a house together and we were kids and everyone was happy, and then i went back to work on the 24th and 25th and was fine. we bought a bucket of kfc on the 24th and heated it up in the oven on the 25th to recreate japanese christmas day. we made a cake out of pancakes. but yeah j. sums it up with the mix of trying not to be anxious about not taking part in it and feeling the unhappiness of, like, hearing from your friends about how they're going home for christmas and it'll be great and, like, they have holiday traditions or whatever and you're alone walking around cursing everything because all the stores are closed and you have to walk three extra blocks to buy a pack of cigarettes at 7-11.

i was involved in a tense, forced celebration on the 23rd

http://www.film.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/DogDayAfternoon.jpg

'santa hat, santa hat! santa hat, santa hat!'

it was just the four of us. mellow. not a big deal. kids were excited but not completely nuts. we had fun playing yankee swap with gag gifts. later we went out for chinese food. we watched pee wee herman's christmas special. we did play christmas music on the radio. none of us are christian. i just liked having a day off. i think you can have low-key and low-stress fun. i just shop on main street here in town. no malls. none of the crap that makes me cringe.

the pee-wee xmas special is wonderful.

i wish we had more mom & pop "main street" type stuff here. our main drag is mostly corporate chain stores.

scott what kinda stores are on the main st. in greenfield? it sounds lovely.

I'm glad the extended-family Christmas didn't happen this year, because I was in no mood for it. Also glad that the reasons it didn't happen didn't have anything to do with me, so I could relax into the lack of travel and forced recreation without guilt. I'm not at war with Christmas but it makes my guts twist and I just want to hide from it.

i read an article confirming that almost all the holiday music we hear out and about is from the forties and fifties, stuff from baby boomers' childhoods. american baby boomers grew up in the most affluent time in our history, and their childhood memories are the stuff of happy and limitless suburban dreams (the white people, anyway, but for the rest of society, even with redlining and shitty Jim Crow laws, there was still a much better safety net than there is now). it's the boomers that decided these songs were immutable classics, that christmas would simply be incomplete without a spiral ham on the table and "jingle bell rock" coming from the home theater system. and it's the conservatism of radio programmers and muzak suits that makes sure the boomers won't be uncomfortable by having to listen to anything more recent than mariah carey or some innocuous cover of "last christmas." so again, it's our parents and grandparents and the fucking "greatest generation" that wrote most of these songs, reminding us that it's their world and we're screwed and we can't afford all the christmas presents we'd like to buy in the mall where this shit is playing because we have none of the union salaries or retirement plans or benefits or GI bill funds that made their lives a goddamn cakewalk.

OTM, "White Christmas" really is a wonderful song