Christmas has changed. I suppose it's inevitable. I'm barely a year away from being twenty. It's natural, right?
But there's a pall that settles over me during Christmas which has nothing to do with the lack of excitement over gift-recieving and holiday cheer. I don't know what it is or how to explain it.
But I think it can be traced back further. If I really ponder, the root of my Christmas dilemmas go back to the night I thought I was going to die.
I don't think I could have been more than ten years old, or else I wouldn't have been so stupid. I was going through some boxes of Christmas decorations and I found some holiday-smelling spray. It was in a pretty box with Dickens-like ice skaters on it, and I thought it was interesting. Being as my family is allergic to everything, we had obviously never used it. I opened it up to see what it smelled like, and the nozzle was turned the wrong way. By accident, I wound up squirting a hell of a lot of it straight into my mouth.
I coughed and grabbed the box to read what it said. Caution: May Be Fatal If Ingested. I panicked and started to cry. This was fairly late at night, and for some reason my mother wasn't home. I went upstairs in utter panic and cried my heart out for hours, praying to God and hoping that I wasn't going to die. My father was downstairs playing Christmas music. I cried throughout the night. It was without a doubt one of the worst of my life.
Of course I was oversensitive, I was ten years old! In hindsight, I don't see why I didn't just talk to my father or call Poison Control. But I suppose there are things we just have to go through on our own. To this day I can't stand the smell of Christmas sprays, or the sound of faraway Christmas music.
As if that memory wasn't bad enough, everything else changed a few years later. Finding the truth about my family meant seeing fourteen years of memories in a harsh, painful light. Ever since then my life has been disjointed, thrown together in weird ways.
Last Christmas was at least a reprieve. I was at my best. I was being nice to relatives I don't particularly like, I was happy and cheery and smiling and actually pulled my nose out of a book for once... but last Christmas was different. There was a promise in the air. Nervous anticipation. And what happened in the week that followed changed my life.
This year... nothingness. Excitement is out of the question, and the hope I once had is gone. Surely there are people with it worse than me, surely there are. I know it. But it's a major loss. I've always been a secret sentamentalist, wanting to capture the essence of something, be it a sunset or a feeling. Now it's useless.
I wish there would be a happy conclusion to my tale, but there isn't. There is no "Christmas Spirit." It's manufactured by stores and commercials to make us feel like shit so we buy more of their stuff in order to feel better. No Christmas is ever like anything we see on TV, except maybe when we're five.
The logic of it is pretty simple:
Christmas is a massive guilt trip where we make up for all the crap we've done to people by buying them stuff. When they recieve the stuff (especially if extravagant), they feel bad because chances are they didn't give you something of equal value, causing a guilt trip on their part.
There's no need to get into problems of world poverty to see the irony in Christmas. I see so much weariness in the people around me. New life saddened by tragic death. Good people wounded, scarred internally and externally. Honest people manipulated to where they no longer know how to trust. And strong people dragged down to where they are too weary to know how to go on. How hard it is to celebrate when hurting. It will be a bittersweet Christmas for all too many.
I suppose one day I'll look forward to creating a Christmas with my future family (or with the way it looks now my CZ ring and imaginary cat). Right now it's all commercialization and fakery. And to be honest, Christmas is something right now I'd rather forget.