cosmic

I hate xmas. I sometimes forget how much I hate it and then it creeps up on me, hello! Tacky decoration and stupid advert time!

There was an interesting post on 3QD about using Thanksgiving to push back on Christmas, and one choice meaty bit was this:

Second, rethink gift-giving.  It is a simple and lamentable fact that the percentage of the Christmas gifts you receive that are useless to you is pretty high.  Yes, it’s the thought that counts.  But if it’s the thought that counts, then it is perfectly acceptable for people to exchange the kind of gift that cannot be purchased in a store, namely, the gift of time.  Tell the adults on your Christmas list that this year you’re giving them the gift of free time; you are releasing them from the obligation to buy for you a gift, and you are encouraging them to spend in some other way the time they would otherwise spend at the mall purchasing a material gift for you.  Offer to make time in January for a long and relaxed lunch date (and then make good on the offer).  For friends with children, offer to babysit so that they may have time for themselves or for each other.  For far-away friends and relatives, resolve to write letters; real letters, with details and thoughts just for them, with questions and occasions for beginning ongoing conversation.

I’m pretty hardline about gifts. I don’t give them often, I don’t give them out of expectation or obligation, and I only give what I think is the best. My whole family is like this: we’ll go years without gifting and then out of the blue I will receive something amazing, or I’ll have a chance to give something perfect, often for no reason at all. Our quality signal of gifting is unusually high, and our standards of expectation and guilt correspondingly low. I appreciate that, I adore my family for this characteristic.

Therefore, I agree with the sentiments quoted above. Adults in our Western society generally already have more crap than they can handle. We want for nothing, and even our children want for nothing if we’d be brutally honest about the whole thing. And yet every year I say that my gift is not to expect a gift and yet it remains a mystifying concept.

But I guess I’ll keep trying in vain. By giving in to the machine of expectation, the guilty exchange of useless shit is only perpetuated. I don’t feel as bad about birthday presents, mind, it’s xmas that really gets my hackles up. And I say that as someone who actually really does love presents.

Anyway, there is no Thanksgiving in the UK to act as a backstop, so all the tackiness is ramping up to full throttle, joy oh joy.