The Importance of Being Idle

So This Is Christmas?

I don't know what it is about Christmas that gets me down, but there's something. I never used to have this when I was younger, I used to love Christmas. I remember as a kid staying at my grandparents house, in a room with no heating and how stupidly cold it was, but how exciting it was to wake up in the morning and go down to open presents huddled around the coal fire. This feeling of isolation, this overwhelming sadness is something that seems to have crept up on me over the past few years. I think my time in retail gave me my passionate dislike of the horrifying over commercialisation of the thing and the utter desperation of retailers to sell you an idea of happiness. And of shoppers for buying it. But it's not just that, although god knows that would be enough by itself. There's something personal, something I don't understand. A loneliness, a sense of isolation, a sense perhaps of my own mortality. I don't really know what it is, but it's desperate and real and quite awful. I wish I did understand it, so I could get past it, maybe see it for the imposter that it is, but it is unknowable to me and the longer it goes on the more it seems set in stone that Christmas will annoy and depress me.
On top of that just a week later we have New Year and that's never fun either, what with it being another chance to look back with regret at the failings of the past year.
Joy.

posted by BadMonkey @ 10:00 PM