Holidays

[mmcirvin]

In spite of everything, Colin likes Christmas and I do too. He doesn't understand why some people don't like it, but I think I do.

How you feel about holidays is going to have to do with with their traditional associations—by which I don't mean associated imagery, symbolism or even necessarily the religious significance, but with what people actually typically do on that day in your society.

If you don't get along with your family or don't have one, Thanksgiving and Christmas will probably not be much fun for you. If you're lonely and consider yourself a hopeless loser at dating, Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve are likely to be stomach-clenching horrors. Vegan? Startled by explosions? The Fourth of July isn't any fun. And so on.

The Christmas shopping season can get enervating, but I've always found Christmas itself kind of nice, the quieter and more private the better. Christmas was big in my family when I was a kid, but these days it's more low-key, even in the years when samantha2074 and I go down there. For some reason, my family's biggest yearly event now is Thanksgiving. Sam's family, on the other hand, isn't as insistent about Thanksgiving but still makes Christmas into a big production, little kids or no little kids.

Easter was always fine; for us thoroughly secular people it just consisted of dyeing eggs and getting candy. But most of the other holidays that people actually celebrated (as opposed to simple days-out-of-school) carried some sort of buried anxiety for me in either childhood or adolescence. As a little kid, I had a terrible startle reflex that made Fourth of July fireworks endlessly harrowing; I didn't entirely get over it until I was a teenager.

But by then, the twin Hammers of Nerds, Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, were times to crawl into a foxhole and pretend I was dead. Occasionally I'd hang out with my other nerd friends for New Year's, but the concept of having a date or getting kissed was about a billion miles away and in another set of dimensions, and I'd be bothered by references in the culture to the effect that this was what everyone was supposedly doing.

Actually, Valentine's Day was creepy from the get-go. What is the reason for those collective packets of Valentine's Day cards that kids are supposed to hand out in school? What do they mean? As far as I can tell, nobody has ever figured it out, and the whole business is nothing but organized embarrassment. When it actually does start to mean something, and becomes a day when everyone's buried longings emerge into the light of public humiliation, it's even worse. And even if you do get into a stable, loving relationship of the sort that I guess Valentine's Day is supposed to be celebrating, then it turns on you again and becomes a big pervy holiday in which you're supposed to enact some combination of 150-year-old gender roles and Hefner/Victoria's Secret notions of what is sexy. Yeah, Valentine's Day can go screw itself, except it's fine as another pretext to buy your spouse some chocolate. We should just rename it Chocolate Day and save everyone some trouble.

Then there's the Halloween thing. This is more personal. My sister Megan always loved Halloween, because for her, always the extrovert, there was nothing better than dressing up in a witch costume, bothering strangers and getting candy. Lots of geeks seem to love Halloween for the creative and performance element; for young adults today it's become the new Carnival.

For me, Halloween started out fun when I was little and other people planned everything for me, but it gradually accumulated not-entirely-explicable social anxieties over time, and by the time I was nearing puberty I had a weird phobia of it. I had lots of elaborate creative ideas for costumes, but what if they were no good?? Part of it was that I was generally convinced that I looked ridiculous and was terrified of looking ridiculous, and of course Halloween is all about looking ridiculous. But lots of people who have personalities similar to mine don't seem to get this block at all; instead they see Halloween as the time when there are no ordinary standards and it's okay to look ridiculous. I've never entirely been able to figure out what my problem was. Maybe I figured there was some distinction between ridiculous-with-panache and ridiculous ridiculous, and had no confidence in my ability to detect or cross the boundary.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Perhaps our culture would benefit if we turned February 14th into Half-Halloween.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

Or just merge it with Carnival? More boobies, less over-booked fancy restaurants. I'm okay with that, as long as it's over -5C here. I'd just go topless under my down parka.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sam immediately took to the "Chocolate Day" suggestion when she read my post. She heartily approves of Chocolate Day. It might further upset people with certain food allergies or dietary restrictions, but you can't please everyone.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

But every day is Chocolate Day!

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much dead-on. I think a lot of my dislike of Christmas is directly due to it not turning out exactly the way my grandmother would have liked in later years, so it turned into her and my mother fighting and me sulking in my room.

Thanksgiving has been a more recent source of apprehension with the notion of hauling myself out to some(one else's) family dinner and hoping they didn't put turkey drippings in the mashed potatoes. I do really enjoy the foods available in autumn, though, and I rather enjoy it as a day if I make the dinner and invite a couple friends over. That's been graydon's mom's domain for a few years now though, and with graydon having been vegetarian since he was 13, she's pretty good at accomodating the two of us such that I actually look forward to dinner now.

I've always loved Halloween and I probably always will, but graydon does not feel the same. I'm sure that if he was pressed to he could come up with a very good costume, but he does not really like drawing attention to himself in that way. I'm sure there is a bit more to it, but this is the explanation he always gives.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

You have Thanksgiving further from Christmas, which does strike me as more calendrically convenient. In the US it's sort of considered the shot across the bow signifying the impending assault of the Christmas season, and everything's a little crazy from then through December, which might be a source of additional apprehension for people not fond of Christmas.

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

However, since it happens before Halloween, it gives stores more license to bring out the Christmas decorations hard and heavy starting November 1st, with no embarassment that they're ignoring a holiday. I think it's actually a bit longer here.

I was thinking this year that I probably wouldn't mind it if it was lower-key and only ran about one or two weeks, but it's more like two months here.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I suppose I could have made it more clear that I recognize I *am* fortunate to have a family I actually like visiting. I mean, we have our Topics To Avoid, but basically sitting around the table with them for a five-hour meal doesn't suck. And I sympathize with those for whom it's torture and who wish Christmas didn't make them obligated. (Though I also think that in a many borderline cases, a bit of annual obligation is a worthwhile thing.)

Mostly I felt that lately I've read way too much sniping at Christmas, and wanted to balance it with a bit of support.

Valentine's Day, on the other hand, sucks unreservedly. I've never felt New Year's Eve to be a big deal, though. Or at least not as anything more than a good excuse for a party.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, the yearly Battle for the Spirit of Christmas became stupidly politicized this year, which was what was making many people mad. When the faction that has just solidified its total control of the federal government, and which you half-suspect has elements that don't like the fact that you can still run around free in the streets, decides to have some further fun by accusing you of seeking to destroy Christmas and using the phrase "Merry Christmas" as a partisan shibboleth, I think it's understandable that you might get a little nuts in reaction.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...New Year's Eve was certainly a lesser anxiety-provoker than Valentine's Day. I never felt comfortable at big, noisy parties when I was an adolescent, and felt as if somehow I should have liked them more than I did, so a party-oriented holiday was a problem (which was probably part of the problem with Halloween, too, since it becomes increasingly party-centric for young adults). But New Year's became defanged when I got older and it became permissible to have settled down.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And, see, this (about dumb people desperately searching for a last-minute New Year's date) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37577-2004Dec30.html) is the kind of story that would have caused me at least a twinge of worry at the age of 18, that maybe I was supposed to be doing something similar. It would have fed into my general notion that society was a mass of obligatory and semi-secret rituals that nobody would just come out and explain to me.