Embracing your inner Grinch — Page 2

Count me among the grinchy. With me, it's more the family b.s. because I'm divorced, hate my ex's new in-laws (who look at my partner and I like we're aliens) and there's more bad blood on my partner's side than the Hatfields and McCoys. Starting 24/7 Christmas music at midnight on November 1st doesn't help.

Weird thing is...I live for Black Friday.

Everything else can go scratch.

I second the dislike for Christmas music.

I also just want to rant... So 4 years ago I was hit by a car while crossing the street on campus. I'm fine now, I broke two teeth and needed stitches in my forehead, but I was incredibly lucky. Thanksgiving was the following week and my family does the customary lets go around the table and say what we're thankful for thing. We normally have a mix of serious and silly with the majority being serious. Well that year my cousin was thankful she got bangs, my grandmother was thankful she ordered the linens amd wouldn't have to wash them, and we made it 3/4 around the table of trivial things like that until my mom interjected and was thankful I was as lucky as I was just a week before. And now the picture of the family hanging up in the living room is from that year where I have 2 black eyes amd several band aids on my face. You would think that any of the pictures we took in the two years in between could suffice. There is not enough booze at thanksgiving for me to be okay with my family time.

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The people who are against Happy Holiday because to them it should only be Christmas make me mad. If you correct people, guess what? You look like an asshole. Makes me want to give them the middle finger for correcting because they couldn't accept a nice greeting.

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The "Jesus is the reason for the season" folks (that includes some members of my family) are my favorite complainers. No, actually, he is not. There was a little thing called the solstice by the pagans and is still celebrated by many countries and faiths around the world. It is unclear when Christ was born and in fact, most of the orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe do not celebrate his birth on this date following the Julian calendar than the Gregorian calendar that puts his birth in early January.

In my neighborhood there was a family that had lights on their house that passed for Christmas lights. They were on before Thanksgiving which led a lot of people in the neighborhood to complain about them rushing Christmas. However, these people were not Christian. They were Sikhs celebrating their holiday, Diwali. It was not until a Sikh temple took up this space nearby that people realized there were other holidays beyond even Hannukah that came around this season.

I did get a little Grinch recently when I entered work on Thanksgiving to hear Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" playing over the speakers. Now it really takes something to make me hate that song as it is my favorite. Something like the Death Cab for Cutie cover could only turn me against it, but wow, hearing that at work on a loop on another holiday nearly did it for me.