For me, it's sort of melancholy, kinda bittersweet....the air is joyous but muted. Hard to explain.
shareNot emotional for me. I have dinner with my kids but that's about it. I like Thanksgiving much more.
shareHappiness, Pride, Anxiety and Faith...
Happiness because i love the company, thoughtful gifts being exchanged amongst loved ones and the feast and the booze aint bad either:)
Pride because i adore my huge, crazy, wonderful, and annoying family and would choose no other...Although some days id like to make a hobo sack and ride the rails out of town!
Anxiety because i always seem to burn something in the oven, run out of firewood or allow some other minor calamity to upset my perfect holiday goal...i really should kick myself some years
Faith because i love the message of the Christmas holiday
That's so beautiful, Shogie. I get a real sense of who you are. The fact that it's not the perfect Christmas image of Brady Bunch-ness (Sorry, couldn't think of a better term. No offense to Brady Bunch fans) makes it all the more relatable. Now, do you have a family member who accidently creates a power-outage due to overworking on Christmas lights?
Not that it was Christmas but I did have a family member who would do the most clumsiest and stupidest things. Once unintentionally electrocuting himself because he thought it was safe to climb up a tree with no safeties trying to hook up a small electrical tower for an advanced radio signal setup...
Thanks twinA...most kind of you
Sadly, im the big dummy that overloads the electrical circuit box every year with too many lights
I go a little overboard every year, Im a huge dummy about this...i just like the lights but some year i will get it perfectly and it will be glorious
That's the thing Shogie, you never can have enough until the next big idea.
For those curious, I should point out that my clumsy relative is alive and well, still kicking. Instead of calling 911, he called my parents asking them what he should do. They told him to call 911. He replied back that the thought honestly had not crossed his mind! O_O
Your relative sounds like a no nonsense badass
Props to him for rallying and being a boss again
That is some toughguy stuff
It gets even better. What does he apply to the bloodied wound he sustained from plummeting to the ground afterwards? He used salt! I mean c'mon. His favorite film is Lethal Weapon. It's as if he forgot about the torture scene where Murtaugh and Riggs are punished with the rubbing of said item on their injuries. U_U
There's a lot more family stories with him just like this. He should have been a professional stunt dummy.
That guy sounds like he ran the frat house, his army unit And The cray-cray wing of the local hospital!!!
shareWe always take time off during Christmas so I do love it from that point of view. Christmas Eve is wonderfully peaceful and I love the Christmas Day meal. But after that I want it to be over.
shareIt gives me an excuse to eat all kinds of foods I hold myself back on from eating the rest of the year!
All the lights, decorations, and festivities give a sense of joy to counter the dreary winter dullness (there's almost always no snow where I live and most of the time we're still in short-sleeve shirts and shorts). I am reminded of all the wonderful times with family members that are no longer around and appreciate the times with the ones that are.
An absolute favorite is setting up the Christmas tree. All the decorations are from mementos passed down through generations of family, one of which is a small stuffed Peter Pan doll that's now over 100 years old, from the early 1900s.
For me? Sadness, anger, anxiety, stress, depression. I hate the holidays. And im in the upper Midwest and its already cold as hell and there is snow on the ground not to mention its pitch black out up here at like 4 oclock in the afternoon. Yeah as soon as the calendar hits Nov 1 I go into a massive funk and cant get myself out of it until March or April.
shareI enjoy it. I like to decorate. I have learned through the many years of Christmases not to expect a Norman Rockwell event. Expecting those, in the past, have left me sad. Christmas in my youth, saw a huge family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins etc. Even the ex- spouses of some aunts and uncles! All converged on my maternal grandmother's home. Food galore, egg nog, booze. I miss those days, yes, melancholy is a perfect word. BUT, I do not dwell on this any longer.
We have certain rituals we observe, dinner out on Christmas eve, then a nice evening afterwards with dessert and coffee at one of my children's home, and start watching "The Christmas Story".
Next day, I cook. We watch football. Then we watch "Christmas Vacation"( my favorite holiday film). The crying that "Clark" does, while watching the old home movie while he is stuck in the attic, listening to Ray Charles , demonstrates the EXACT FEELING I have, if I permit myself.
Hmm. Nostalgia, some depression, loneliness, a tiny bit of fun. Christmas isn't much for me anymore. When I was a kid it was magical. Now I just can't get into the spirit of it anymore, and I have no one to spend it with. I go through the motions, watch some movies I enjoy, but yeah, the magic's gone. But I do miss Christmas in my childhood. I didn't even have a happy childhood, but Christmas was always a bright spot that not even my dad could ruin (entirely). To some extent I still like the music, the decorations, the movies. But it doesn't have what it once had.
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