Yo. Anti-christmas here. I've told people and told people not to waste money on me for christmas because we don't have it to waste. They don't listen, and wonder why I get pissy about it. I've never lived above the poverty line. Ever. Many christmases were filled with cheap chocolates and last season's clearance toys so that we'd have stuff to open. We were so far below the poverty line at some points that heat, water and electricity were intermittent throughout the holidays depending on what bills my parents could pay. The insides of my bedroom windows frosted over almost every night. We wore wet clothes to school that would partially freeze because we couldn't dry them after they got washed. They would just hang around the house and we'd hope they'd dry, and they wouldn't because it was too cold. My dad would skip taking his already meager lunch (two ham and cheese sandwiches and a coke,) to his barely above minimum wage factory job to buy us presents for the holidays, and he'd still get chewed out by his coworkers when it was time to talk about presents.
What pisses me off the most about the season is seeing people who know they don't have enough throw huge amounts of cash they should be buying necessities around to buy shit they don't need because they were told to. I don't like the holiday because a) I'm not religious (pretty well known that I'm extremely anti-organized religion,) so the sudden jolt of religious fervor in general society irritates me, even if it is mostly lip service, and b) huge corporations get extremely pushy about how you have to buy EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW because that's the real American way. To top it all off, the weather is cold as balls, and as I've said elsewhere, that's 100% misery for me. (Not to mention sleeping in a truck or in an uninsulated hay-loft in below-freezing weather. Or being kicked out of a soup kitchen line for not being religious. Not exactly good holiday memories.)
Wanna know the worst part of all of it? Everyone tells you that you have to be happy all the time. They don't ask, they tell. It is a societal demand that you feel a certain way and if you don't you're a horrible person and deserve scorn and derision. You have to be happy for the after-Halloween shopping season, you have to be happy for family that you don't go out of your way to see, you have to be happy for the off-key drunk door to door carolers, you have to be happy for kids who want everything under the sun because they don't know better and we actively lie to them and you can't stop people from lying to them, (is that you, Santa Claus?) You have to be happy about the miserable weather, the sudden lunacy that crops up, the pseudo-religious rituals (and yet I have a tree in my living room. Trees don't belong indoors,) and the vast quantity of waste. We waste huge quantities of electricity on extra festive lights, huge quantities of money on things we don't really need, and swathes of time doing things that aren't normally part of the plan. Don't even get me started on bows and wrapping paper.
Look, I like getting presents as much as everyone else, but the money could be better spent elsewhere. Save it for something important, like an emergency, or pay the damn bills. I really, really wish I could just opt out, but my own family refuses to understand, so I can't. Instead, I get belittled with "scrooge" and "grinch" nicknames that they think is cute. I frequently get told at work (this is holiday season seven in retail,) that I shouldn't look so sour, it's christmastime, cheer up. Maybe I am 2edgy4u, and maybe I'm just a curmudgeonly old jerk. The holiday doesn't represent anything to me but a sudden grip of madness that sweeps the land and refuses to let go until it changes years. I dread everything about it every year, and every year it's always "christmas is good, why can't you just be happy?"
tl;dr: Bah humbug, fuckers.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3781159 times)