Writer's Block: Holiday cheer
Dec. 21st, 2009 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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The holidays are generally pleasant for me. I get caught up in the holiday spirit thing, and I'm definitely very nostalgic. I was nostalgic as a kid before I even had anything to nostalgic about! That's probably why I've always been so anal about my Christmas traditions. I've always wanted everything to be the same each year. During Christmas, I feel not only in-tune with my own past but a cultural consciousness of Christmases past. I like how Christmas is a time to break out old favorites: Christmas specials don't age as fast as regular cartoons and movies do, everyone can sing along to classic Christmas songs, and timeless Christmas stories remain, well, timeless.
Lately, however, my Christmases have also been bittersweet in that I've realized some things are changing and soon my Christmases will as well, but I've been handling it with mature acceptance so far. For instance, I had a subconscious awareness that Christmas my junior year of college would be the "last Christmas like this" with Grama and Winston and my family all together at our house-- and I was right, because Winston passed away within the year and Grama's health has been declining so that we've had to go see her instead. It didn't upset me too much, just made me really focus on it and appreciate it at the time. Conversely, I'm also excited about the possibilities for future Christmases. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but I'd really love to share my Christmas traditions with Robert and experience his with him sometime.
I don't find anything depressing about Christmas itself, honestly-- but I'm also pretty young and have had generally good experiences on Christmas. I'm lucky: I've never spent a Christmas totally alone; I don't have dependents I can't afford to buy gifts for; I don't have any family members harping on me for my lack of attention to the religious aspect of the holiday and I don't stress myself out over society's commercialization and lack of religiosity; and I never have that many irritating obligation gifts to buy, just things for my close friends and immediate family who aren't as difficult to shop for. (For all its gift-giving obsession, Japan does not have a Christmas gift-giving tradition!-- but I will have to bring back goodies from the States as souvenirs for my coworkers upon my return; I'm not totally off the hook, here :-P). I mean, it is stressful trying to buy gifts, but it doesn't outweigh the other pleasures of the holiday for me.
But Christmas is a bright spot in an otherwise uninspiring and sometimes outright depressing season. Winter + seasonal affective disorder + susceptibility to cold = not a happy Amy for three months out of the year. Like I've said before, I really wish they'd just move Christmas (since it's only an arbitrary day anyway; early Christians stuck it in late December to compete with/replace existing pagan solstice celebrations) to late January since that's always when I'm at my worst. While you'd think the shortest day of the year would be the worst-- since SAD is caused mostly by light-- the solstice is still early enough in the winter season that the cold and snow is still novel enough to be pleasant. In late January and early February, it's still cold (if not colder), still pretty dark, and the snow is no longer festive but a fucking pain in the butt. I've noticed from the time I was in fourth grade that I become substantially moodier around this time of year. I could use a pick-me-up sometime in there.
Speaking of which, does anyone else think it's weird we dub the solstices the *first* days of spring and winter? They don't work much better as the midwinter and midsummer marks, since winter is definitely at its coldest in mid- to late January and summer at its peak during the dog days of July, but as far as temperature and seasonal appropriateness goes, I always kind of felt like summer begins sometime in mid- to late May and winter mid- to late November. I think March and September get it right for the beginnings of spring and fall, respectively, but it's always been weird to me that June is mostly spring and December is mostly fall.
The holidays are generally pleasant for me. I get caught up in the holiday spirit thing, and I'm definitely very nostalgic. I was nostalgic as a kid before I even had anything to nostalgic about! That's probably why I've always been so anal about my Christmas traditions. I've always wanted everything to be the same each year. During Christmas, I feel not only in-tune with my own past but a cultural consciousness of Christmases past. I like how Christmas is a time to break out old favorites: Christmas specials don't age as fast as regular cartoons and movies do, everyone can sing along to classic Christmas songs, and timeless Christmas stories remain, well, timeless.
Lately, however, my Christmases have also been bittersweet in that I've realized some things are changing and soon my Christmases will as well, but I've been handling it with mature acceptance so far. For instance, I had a subconscious awareness that Christmas my junior year of college would be the "last Christmas like this" with Grama and Winston and my family all together at our house-- and I was right, because Winston passed away within the year and Grama's health has been declining so that we've had to go see her instead. It didn't upset me too much, just made me really focus on it and appreciate it at the time. Conversely, I'm also excited about the possibilities for future Christmases. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but I'd really love to share my Christmas traditions with Robert and experience his with him sometime.
I don't find anything depressing about Christmas itself, honestly-- but I'm also pretty young and have had generally good experiences on Christmas. I'm lucky: I've never spent a Christmas totally alone; I don't have dependents I can't afford to buy gifts for; I don't have any family members harping on me for my lack of attention to the religious aspect of the holiday and I don't stress myself out over society's commercialization and lack of religiosity; and I never have that many irritating obligation gifts to buy, just things for my close friends and immediate family who aren't as difficult to shop for. (For all its gift-giving obsession, Japan does not have a Christmas gift-giving tradition!-- but I will have to bring back goodies from the States as souvenirs for my coworkers upon my return; I'm not totally off the hook, here :-P). I mean, it is stressful trying to buy gifts, but it doesn't outweigh the other pleasures of the holiday for me.
But Christmas is a bright spot in an otherwise uninspiring and sometimes outright depressing season. Winter + seasonal affective disorder + susceptibility to cold = not a happy Amy for three months out of the year. Like I've said before, I really wish they'd just move Christmas (since it's only an arbitrary day anyway; early Christians stuck it in late December to compete with/replace existing pagan solstice celebrations) to late January since that's always when I'm at my worst. While you'd think the shortest day of the year would be the worst-- since SAD is caused mostly by light-- the solstice is still early enough in the winter season that the cold and snow is still novel enough to be pleasant. In late January and early February, it's still cold (if not colder), still pretty dark, and the snow is no longer festive but a fucking pain in the butt. I've noticed from the time I was in fourth grade that I become substantially moodier around this time of year. I could use a pick-me-up sometime in there.
Speaking of which, does anyone else think it's weird we dub the solstices the *first* days of spring and winter? They don't work much better as the midwinter and midsummer marks, since winter is definitely at its coldest in mid- to late January and summer at its peak during the dog days of July, but as far as temperature and seasonal appropriateness goes, I always kind of felt like summer begins sometime in mid- to late May and winter mid- to late November. I think March and September get it right for the beginnings of spring and fall, respectively, but it's always been weird to me that June is mostly spring and December is mostly fall.
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Date: 2009-12-21 03:14 pm (UTC)Personally, Christmas has, to me, always been about that uber-warm nostalgia rather than religious or materialistic (even though as kids it's "bring on the presents!"). Lately, I've been getting this feeling that as I'm slowly living on my own, Christmas is becoming less of an event with my family. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, bc I can understand that after years of putting together such a tradition, it gets tiring. Perhaps this is the time for me to start doing my own Christmas tradition, a new era of nostalgia. Sure, I will always have home to go to and some of the tradition/memories to be the same, but it'll never be fully what it was like before......wow I'm a bit depressed now :P
Maybe I am jumping the gun here, but I would love to start a new Christmas tradition with you, Amy. Perhaps between the two of us, we can fill in those nostalgic gaps in each others current holiday situation and make it our own :)