No, I do not have the holiday spirt nor am I a Christmas nazi, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
We do not have a Christmas tree and for that I am glad. Christmas trees are a pain in the butt. You have to go out and buy them, set them up, decorate them, make sure they don’t catch on fire, and then after it sits there for a while you have to go and throw it all away. It sounds kinda frivilous doesn’t it? Yea, it does. Some people act as if the only place that they can put store their presents is under a tree. Presents could easily be put on top of the refrigerator instead! Why are people so fasinated with putting presents under a tree?
Some will tell you they do it for their children. The truth is that they don’t do it for their children, they do it for themselves. Parents are the most selfish people I know. All they want to do is to be able to see the look on their children’s face when they come down the stairs on Christmas morning. Adults will do almost anything to see that look, and in all cases they will lie to their children for it. Heart breaking isn’t it? Imagine being told stories of a large fat man coming down the shoot in the middle of the night with loads of gifts on his back, all addressed to you. That is enough to fill any child’s head with lofty visions and to wet their lips with pure anticipation and excitement. How any parent could live with themselves after tricking and decieving their children like that is beyond me.
Let me put forth that suppose one day in the future I have children of my own. If that ever does happen, I will not buy a Christmas tree, or tell them about Santa, or buy them loads of gifts. During the holiday season we will all jump in the car and drive to some place like Target or Walmart and they will each get to pick out one thing that they want and that will be their “holiday gift”. Most children have enough toys as it is, and those that don’t have enough toys don’t appreciate the few toys they have and therefore don’t deserve anymore anyways.
Ah, Christmas is a special time of the year though. Not really.. Wait, well.. we do get off of work and off of school and off of whatever else we hate doing. Yes, in that sense Christmas is a special time. It is a day of rest for most everybody. But Christmas is not a special time of the year in that it is the birth of Jesus. Because Jesus was not even born on Christmas day, he was born near the time of the feast of the Tabernacles if anything. Christmas if anything is a tradition create by man. The roots of Christmas are most likely in some pegan festival that was marketed as the birth of Jesus just so that it would be more attractive for Christians to celebrate. Of course I don’t really know where Christmas came from, but if I had to speculate based upon my own idea, that would be it. Though, you’ll probably find that people 100 or 200 years ago did not celebrate Christmas like we do today. To me Christmas isn’t really very special. More or less it is a time to take a break and spend with family.
Around the time of New Year people come up with resolutions and goals for the coming year ahead and reflect on the year that has past. What is the purpose of a resolution and why does it have to be done at New Years? Resolutions are things that people save up throughout the whole entire year and then when New Years come they decide to act upon them. New Years is just that, a fresh start of a new year. But honestly, to me I feel more of a fresh start each time I wake up in the morning than I do when New Years comes around. Why can’t people just do their resolutions in the morning when they wake up? The benefit of doing so would be so that at the end of the year you are not overwhelled with how many resolutions you have to do. If you distribute your resolutions evenly throughout the year you don’t have to worry about them piling up on you while you are away on vacation.
New Years has never been appealing to me. Watching a ball drop is not that great, especially when you live in a different time zone than where the ball dropping at. The problem of the ball dropping in another time zone is easily solved, but I do not know why people don’t do it. If you shoot a ball into outerspace so that is in a desending orbit around the Earth, it will drop in every time zone as it makes its way around the Earth. This way all tribes and nations could celebrate the dropping of one ball regardless of the time zone that is in. Furthermore if the ball took 30 years to completely drop to the Earth, we could always celebrate the fact that each new second is the start of a new year ahead into the future.
Perhaps one of the worst things about New Years is that teachers all across the world make their students write out their resolutions and goals for the the next half of the year. They force their students to come up with something that they feel they should improve upon. These assignments are meaningless and nothing but busy work to those few students that are perfect. For this reason alone, New Years always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. How should anybody know what they need to improve upon if somebody does not tell them? It be easier and more just if teachers did the assignments themselves and taylored the answers toward the students that need improvement.
For me, the holiday season is not about the holidays but about the time I get to rest and relax with family and friends.
Oh the holidays..
