The Folly of Christmas

As a child, Christmas is a great holiday with all the candy and food, but as you get older it becomes more tedium and selfishness. The original holiday was much better, more about helping each other through hard times than gifts.

It is ironic that the people who claim the holiday as theirs are the very people who ruined it. Christians removed the joys of sharing with people in need and replaced it with giving your kids junk which they don't even need.

But the tedium comes mostly from age, the holiday is exactly the same every year. From the decorations to the traditions, and more importantly the music.

As we grow older, we have had the holiday shoved down our throats every year. The same greetings, the same decorations, the same iconography, the same traditions, and the same damned songs.

I sit in Starbucks typing this, and hear over the loud speakers the exact same songs written before my mother was even born. Most were recorded when she was a child.

Now I have heard these same songs on repeat, making for the same one being played at least a hundred times per day in all the businesses, for forty years. That means I have heard them repeated more than a million times each, and now they're driving me insane.

To compound the problem, the exact same decorations are hung in most businesses, except Starbucks. Starbucks has the compassion to at least try to vary their decorations every year.

But most have the same plastic ice hangings, blinding blinky lights, snow made of cotton, nativity garbage, headache inducing red and green window decals, plastered on their display cases. The only time of the year in which no creativity is seen in any window display.

As you pass the businesses to carry on your day, you try not to let those toxic, repetitive colors destroy what little sanity remains at this point only to be assault by another cookie cutter display of pure laziness. To make it worse, people actually pretend to enjoy this maddening trash.

The trees through downtown are strangled by the same lights they hang last year, adding to the light pollution most of us never enjoyed anyway. This assault on our senses is offensive to a species who prides themselves on being the most adaptive.