My Favorite Day

YESSS, it’s Over!

I hate Christmas. Always have, so this is probably my favorite day of the year. Christmas is over and the entire Holiday Season not far behind.

I shouldn’t really be too happy as the signs of Christmas will be around for a few more weeks. For some reason people insist on leaving their damned Christmas lights and trees in place for a week or two after it's over. To me that’s more rude than not taking down campaign signs after an election.

I’ll never understand why any rational adult would willingly take part in Christmas. That was one of many advantages of being single back in the good ol’ days. I could pretty much ignore Christmas and the rest of the so called holidays. Sure, I still had to suffer through the long shopping lines when all I wanted to do was make a quick beer run. The mail was screwed up and I had to look at all the Christmas lights everyone had up but, for the most part, I could ignore it and even make some overtime by working on Christmas Day.

Still, at least one or two well meaning people would always come by my place cause they felt sorry about me living alone and "not having a Christmas". They’d bring some small gift and the worst part is you had to say thank you and be Christmasy with them just to be polite, even though you were pissed. That used to really burn me up, despite their good intentions.

It has gotten better over the years. Fewer and fewer people are doing Christmas lighting and it seems fewer are buying Christmas trees. Not sure about the trees, though. Maybe not as many people are putting the trees in windows where everyone can see them, as a security precaution? I’m sure about the lights. I remember back in the sixties I could look up the street I lived on and every house seemed to have lights up. Now, it seems like less than half the households put up decorations. Whether that's due to people worrying about their energy bill, or a sign of a growing disinterest in Christmas, that's a good thing and let’s hope that trend continues.

Last but not least, it’s great that all those Christmas TV specials went by the wayside. Not only were they a nuisance, apparently people actually watched them so the networks kept producing them. Some years ago I read that the ratings for those shows plummeted so they had to drop them for lack of sponsors. Congrats to all for the lack of interest. May this be a sign of more good things to come.

Hopefully, more and more people will lose interest in Christmas. Maybe some day it will get as much attention as some of the other not- celebrated- much holidays, but I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. Probably to my dying day, I’ll have to suffer through that miserable period of time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day known as The Holidays.

But for today, I can happily say, It's over!