I don’t like Christmas. I actually am growing feelings of hate toward the holiday. It was fun back when I was young and it was all about playing with cousins and eating and having fun. Now it’s about obligations, disappointing people with gifts no matter how hard you try, selfishness and greed. It’s so fucking pathetic that you can’t just do the simple gesture of giving somebody you care about a gift without some feeling of competition coming out. Suddenly you have to worry about your gift not being as good as the one they got you, or vice-versa, then there is resentment, you’re not on the Christmas card list next year, people talk negatively about your gift-giving behind your back. What a load of crap. Then there is this whole thing where you are pressured into buying people presents because of who they are, who they know or what they got you last year. So you feel like you’re forced to be nice to people buy spending money on them. That’s like forced charity or something.
I was hopefully getting out of the whole bullshit materialist present parade this year… I was going to get something for my dad, possibly something small/sentimental for the grandparents and then a single gift to pass for the woman’s family. That turned into two gifts to pass for each of us and two gifts for my cousins. My family started this whole cousin gift exchange thing (since there are like 80 of us). It’s a nice idea, but most of us are grown and hardly know each other anymore… so it will probably be a gift-card exchange.
I’m just glad I will be out of town for the bulk of the holiday. I wish I could skip the entire month of December to avoid ANY Christmas activities until people get their priorities straight and realize this holiday isn’t about getting new this or that… it’s about family and friends and love and all that good shit.  Screw it, I’ll just keep drinking plenty of wine, paste on a phony smile and take it like a champ.