Sure, the first year (or two) of COVID were wretched, but most of those barriers have since cleared — yet I’m still struggling. I’ve noticed the same with a number of people within my family and neighbourhood.
How are others feeling? Are you struggling, yet succeeding? If so, how are you breaking through?
I wonder if this is true for others but I’m just not close to my family. I think most people have smaller social circles today than they did 10 years ago.
Without close family, there’s a lot less to Christmas.
My impression is just that nobody has the money for it anymore.
really? For me it’s more of a not having time. Doesn’t cost much to go caroling, watch Charlie Brown, cut paper snowflakes, make handmade gifts, etc
Money is time. When you spend all of your time and energy focusing on working, eating, and sleeping because you’re too broke to do anything else, it doesn’t leave you with much time or energy to care about christmas.
Yeah, if you’re working it all just becomes decorations along your commute, interrupted by a few busy family days followed by more work.
Money is the issue with all holidays in recent times. Take the fuckin’ money out of it, it should never have been involved in the first place.
Jólabókaflóð – forget gifts, exchange books and sit around a fire drinking hot chocolate
That is an amazing tradition!
Christmas is a whole month dedicated to consumerism and kitsch. It’s no surprise you’re bored of it now.
yup! It can be hard to sustain holiday cheer for 5+ weeks
You’re right that it’s about consumerism for many people, but it doesn’t have to be.
There are ideas and arguments that can counter consumerism.
For instance - putting away same old decorations and reusing them should lower consumerism somewhat.
Xmas 2020 with all the “shortages”, at the Target and WalMarts near me the holiday aisles was very scant, and practically completely picked over by the week before. I had genuinely hoped that could have been an eye opener for America.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t
I reuse the same decorations over and over again and don’t really think I am doing anything special.
For instance - putting away same old decorations and reusing them should lower consumerism somewhat.
Wait, do people NOT do this? I use the same shit every year unless it’s broken and I can’t fix it. Usually my cats are in some way to blame for that.
I assume most do. No I am not going to spend hours trying to remember some cheap plastic thing I bought a decade ago from the dollar store but if it’s fine sure I put it away for next year
Or you could be like my mom, who has to buy a new fake tree like every year.
They actually have these things now called real trees that are perfect for discarding every year after you are done with them.
I even paid extra for a biodegradable one!
They leave needles everywhere. Imo, better to just use the same fake tree for decades.
They have actually found way of making some of them so that they ether don’t leave needles around or if they do that needles are soft. Super nice, it has been our tree type of choice for a few years now.
Dunno how many do/don’t do it 😁
I just wanted to point out a rather obvious idea 😂
Earth would also thank you!My cousins have upped this game. They have toddlers. Starting in Feb, they begin stealing back the least popular toys and hiding them in the attic. Then they regift them back to the kids next Christmas. They only buy a couple new items every year.
It reduces clutter in the house and will probably work until around 6, when they plan to shift from regifting to donating.
Could it be an age thing?
I’m 32.
I’ve had issues with it past maybe 3-6 years.- Listen at a Christmas radio
- Watch a Christmas movie/animations/cartoons
- Read Christmas books/comics
- Write your own Christmas stories
- Talk about Christmas
- Do your favorite Christmas’y thing
- Create a new Christmas’y habit
- Make a Christmas music playlist
- Create a Chistmas get-together
- Sing Christmas carols (alone or with someone(karaoke))
- Craft something Christmas’y
Listening at music, watching a movie and the radio has helped me reach some level of Christmas!
I lost my dad to cancer about two week before last Christmas. And my birthday is a few days after Christmas as well. I’ll be damned if I ever feel like celebrating Christmas or my birthday ever again
My mother passed at the same time last year. It’s been a tough year and Christmas things are just making me sad this year.
You’re not alone in this and I’ve been told it gets better.
I lost my sister suddenly 2 days before Christmas in 2008. The joy came back — after a fair amount of therapy and contemplation — and over time, life grew around the gaping hole.
A couple of quotes that I keep near me:
Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Mark Manson
When you dull pain and hide it from yourself, you dull your joys as well.
Robin Hobb, Fool’s Fate (Tawny Man #3)
All the best for this holiday season, and all the ones that follow.
Overused but a favorite of mine:
Gotta have opposites, light and dark and dark and light, in painting. It’s like in life. Gotta have a little sadness once in awhile so you know when the good times come. I’m waiting on the good times now.
- Bob Ross
I’m really sorry about your loss. Christmas is whatever, but I hope you can get to a place to truly appreciate your birthday.
definitely. i’m usually dreading the part right after opening gifts. – the whole day feels stagnant and dead, everything is shut, there’s nothing to do but wait for how shitty jan and feb will be. brutal dead awful months
Seriously fuck winter
Maybe you just got older.
Maybe you’re just getting older.
If it wasn’t for my kids, I wouldn’t even bother with the tree.
I guess “getting into Christmas” probably means something different to everyone. For me it’s about reliving good memories of friends and family. Some of my favorite memories are decorating cookies with my kids, mixing batches fudge, sipping eggnog and coffee over pie and ice cream, or dancing with my kids to Christmas music.
So for Christmas I play Christmas music, setup a tree, make cookies and fudge, and send the treats and little mementos to friends and family around the country. This year I sent Christmas muffins, fudge, drawings my daughter made, little $1 bottles of peppermint schnapps with Cocoa packets, and other things like Santa socks that I divied up from a cheap multipack. That was the presents I sent out to all our friends and family.
But if I didn’t have those memories or enjoy baking, I doubt I would do much for it. So I suppose, ask yourself what getting into Christmas means to you, or take the time to define what you want it to mean to you, and then do the thing. If it’s taking a little bit of extra time to show family you are thinking of them, then a little home assembled Cocoa kit and a card might do it. You don’t need to go crazy with decorations or buying presents to get into Christmas, unless that is what you want it to mean to you.
My kids are getting to the point where they’re either past believing in Santa or on the cusp of realizing what’s going on (if they haven’t already), otherwise I don’t really do much Christmas stuff with adults outside of work. I haven’t felt anything for Christmas for years apart from getting gifts for kids. The only big benefit is time off from work.
This was actually a fairly stress-free year present-wise. I got all my shopping early and stuff wrapped except for one last-minute thing I need for my son due to delayed shipping.
Looks like it will be a BROWN Christmas here this year. Which is a grim fucking reminder that we’ve fucked the planet and it is only going to get worse.
So. There’s that.
It will be a standing water Christmas for me
It’s not just brown here, which is super rare, it’s so warm that I can’t even take my daughter skating at the outdoor rink.
I live in SASKATCHEWAN
For me it’s definitely the weather. When i see Christmas lights and shit, but i walk around in shorts i just feel dreadful.
I hated Christmas when I worked in retail, and for several years after. I’ve only gotten back into it the past few years, and now my husband has gotten sentimental and wants to put up meaningful ornaments instead of just nice looking ones.
My family didn’t have a tradition of gifting ornaments every year so I’ve been building up a collection of personal ornaments the past few years to catch up with him, which is a cute and fun thing to do as a couple.
I’m sorry I don’t know how to help. Personally nothing beats the cosy feeling of hot chocolate in front of a fire, cuddling watching TV, basking in the glow of a lit tree. It feels like Christmas to me and I love it.
im not that into it. Im sorta a nod and smile and enjoy how other folks are into it. I do like leaving little gifts for my condo neighbors but its gotten skimpier and skimpier as prices have been higher to where now they just get a tin of butter cookies. I would love to get back to where I was changing things up with chocolate or inexpensive wine. sigh.
So it’s felt like this to me basically since I became an adult. For one, I work in an industry where the holidays mean nothing. And two, now I have adult shit to do, so there isn’t a ton of time to just sit around baking and watching Christmas specials and what not. Also can’t really stand the consumerist side of things and while I do like giving gifts as a thing, I don’t like the idea of “just buy some shit” or “whoever gets the most presents wins.”
Now all that said, when I think back to what used to make the holidays special for me, I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you’re probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like “Bake cookies/Watch ‘The Grinch’” into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.
I think this also helps a lot with other people, or in my case, my kids. I don’t have a ton of friends (I’m very much a person with a small circle, but all people i know I can call if i need help moving if that makes sense) but we do some small get togethers. With my kids, I try to do more of the things that make things feel special for them. Lights on the house I could take or leave (back to being lazy) but I do my best and I put them up, even though it was just a few days ago because that was the first day that wasn’t pouring where I was at home when it was light out. I make it a point to watch some Christmas movies (and let the kids come to a consensus on which) and bake some cookies or whatever. We usually go every year to that neighborhood where every house has cool lights, even if that is an hour drive away. Lots of little things like that.
Anyway, I feel like the holidays are very much a “fake it til you make it” scenario. I tend to think about it like “what do I remember that I liked about holidays” when I was a kid, and then force myself to do those things. What I’ve generally found is that there are definitely times I’ve regretted not doing anything like that, but I never regret when I forced myself to do something like this, and I rarely remember the “forced” part.
I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you’re probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like “Bake cookies/Watch ‘The Grinch’” into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.
This is the most real advice I’ve seen on Lemmy. It really fucking sucked realizing that no one was going to make things special for me (mostly because I hated the realization that I was expecting someone/something else to make my life more fun). Celebrating holidays and doing seasonal things that are special for the time of year REALLY help break up the monotony of the grind of everyday life (work, kids, bills, house work, ad nauseum). It would be nice to have someone else create that magic for me, but… that doesn’t really happen as an adult. You have to make things fun for yourself, and for others if you can.
Stop waiting for a single (or a couple) days of the year to put effort in for enjoyment, do it every damn day.
