I absolutely love Christmas. As soon as Halloween is over, I enter Christmas mode and I don’t care. People who get mad and have to wait until after Thanksgiving are lame and gross and I don’t like them. Get over yourselves. I love looking at all the Christmas decorations, especially in the rich people’s neighborhoods. I love all the holiday scents, the baking, the movies (for the most part), and finally being able to wear a sweater even if the high for the day is 70 degrees. Although I love Christmas, I have to keep things interesting in this column, and I’m a lot better at writing hate than praise. Here are some things I hate about Christmas.
Some Christmas commercials are cute like the Coca-Cola ones and that Hershey’s Kiss one, but for the most part they suck. Especially when the product being advertised could never have anything to do with Christmas. How are you going to tell me that car insurance is the perfect holiday gift for my 4-month-old niece?
Sometimes the car commercials have good Christmas vibes, but I don’t know of any middle class families who are buying two new $40,000 Toyota trucks for themselves. Sometimes a commercial will be so cute and pure and make me feel so cozy and happy but then I find out it’s for like rash cream or something and then I feel like I need to take a shower. Stop being weird. Shut up.
I do love Christmas, even in the South. But I always feel underwhelmed with the holiday season in general around here. There’s no snow, no decent breeze until mid December, the leaves don’t even fall all pretty. They just all die during November and fall off at the same time. Sometimes I forget we’re even in the holiday season because of the lack of appropriate weather. I miss the holiday spirit I felt as a kid when I lived in Utah. I miss seeing the range of oranges and reds during the Fall and making snowmen and sledding during the Winter. To me, spending Christmas Eve in shorts doesn’t feel like Christmas at all.
A less enjoyable core memory of mine is Christmas Eve about 5 years ago when it was seventy-five degrees outside, and I spent half of the day helping my parents paint our fence. I was sweating. This would have never happened if we were back in Utah with 10 inches of snow. Luckily, I live in Mount Pleasant where the taxes are high enough to pay for extensive Christmas decorations all around town, and that brings me back to the childhood feeling of Christmas. Still, if we could get some climate change in the opposite direction and have some snow, that would be great! Thanks!
This Christmas will be my first Christmas working in retail, and I can already tell what’s going to disturb me the most. I don’t mind the crowds, I don’t mind the constant customer questions, and seeing people doing their Christmas shopping actually makes me really happy. What really gets to me is bratty, loud, ungrateful little kids running around screaming at their parents trying to tell them what to buy. When I’m a mom I will not hesitate to give my kids boxes of coal if they ever act up like that.
Parents, please reconsider taking your kids into a book – store with you if you’re there to buy them a child ’ s anger management book. Child leashes are also a good investment. Some of the adults can be a pain too. They get mad at you when you don’t have exactly what you’re looking for, or when the holiday crowds are present during the holiday season, or when Wal-Mart has the same thing for $10 less. Okay? So leave then.
Hallmark movies are the mark of the devil. The outfits are horrible. The plots are all the same. The one liners sound like they were copied off from the back of a bad Christmas card. Every character is static and way too happy. My mom has been playing them constantly one after the other all Christmas season. I don’t care if they’re not supposed to be good, if they’re just for the Christmas vibes, and they help out actors who can’t get roles anywhere else. I can’t stand them. The constant jingle-bell filled soundtrack never ends to cover up the lack of halfway decent writing. I know I sound like a huge snob for saying all this and I swear I realize that they’re just for the good Christmas vibes, but they don’t bring me that. They disturb me. They make me feel sad and sickly. There’s no joy. Only disappointment.
All that being said, I love the decorations, the music, the food and the nostalgia that comes from Christmas. It makes me happy to see everybody else out shopping for the people they love (or were forced to buy gifts for). It’s one my favorite days of the year and I don’t think I’ll ever get a good night’s sleep on Christmas Eve. I want my goodies. Company CEOs and toddlers just need to shut up, though.
