Comradeship // Freechat

Fun fact: nearly every christmas decoration in the world in now produced in Yiwu, China.

I love the aesthetics and ambiance of Christmas. Warm colorful lights and decorations. The festive feeling and using reefs and such to bring color to an otherwise horribly gray and depressing season.

I HATE all the obsession with gift giving and shopping and buying. Basically, the way capitalism wormed its way into it.

Essentially, I like all the parts of Christmas that were basically stolen from other religions. I hate the aspects from Christianity, which were the easiest to use to inject capitalism into it (presents).

I think it should just be about bringing warmth and color to an otherwise cold and drab season. Where I'm from, there's more deciduous trees than coniferous so all the trees loose their leaves. The sky is most overcast. With nothing but bare, dead looking trees and overcast sky, everything becomes gray and depressing. Due to the angle of the sun it's like, daytime is "perpetually 10 am untill all of a sudden it's 3pm. Then you get off work and by the time you are home it's night."

Christmas lights and such combat that drab depression. I just wish the holiday was more about JUST being with friends and family and bringing some cheer and warmth. Instead of all the shopping and "literally kill someone for the last TV on black Friday" type shit. Fuck presents. It's too much of a focus when it SHOULD be like, a minor side thing. Little fun stuff not the main focus.

I'm conflicted about Christmas.

I love the idea of Christmas, that is a midwinter festival that involves community, family, food, and colourful lights to brighten up those long December nights. I love that it has the power to bring people together even in the darkest of times (I learned about the Christmas truce of WW1 at a very impressionable age). I love giving someone a thoughtful gift and seeing them light up with joy. I'm even a sucker for going to church and singing Christmas hymns and reading the story of Christ's birth even though I'm not religious.

I detest that it is an orgy of consumerism. I detest that it's just another empty vessel to sell crap. I detest that for two months there's never ending pressure to buy this or that, the advertising pressure that it's not Christmas without buying a bunch of garbage that nobody cares about.

I still come out on the side of loving Christmas but it's in spite of its modern incarnation, not because of it. I absolutely understand people who hate Christmas, it's been hollowed out and transformed into just another capitalist festival of consumption

I worked in retail so you can probably guess my opinion on Christmas.

Are there any good holidays in the U.S?

It all seems like the same day of consumption with a different outfit on depending on the time of year

suburban winter sucks, holiday music sucks, consumerism sucks

lots of things to dislike about how christmas is without earning a visit from three ghosts.

Halloween is the only good holiday, at least of the ones we celebrate in America

I work in a grocery store, so I'm assaulted by Christmas music for a whole month straight. That already puts me at odds with the season, and add into that seasonal depression and not being remotely Christian, Christmas just means less than nothing to me, really.

No you're not the only one, I high-key hate it

Kinda different but same topic: I love Halloween. In the country I live it's seen as the most consumerist holiday, focused around selling themed snacks and cheap decoration and kids going around collecting those snacks. Also tacky costume parties. Also it's seen as very american.

I hate all those things but ironically it's my favourite: First think autumn is beautiful and having a holiday with spooky-cozy vibes is great. I guess as an autistic trans person I also feel connected to monsters, or people being perceived as such. Dressing up also is an excuse to roleplay openly lol.

Christmas can be nice if you have family you enjoy having the chance to meet. I have friends who have or had to meet their abusers this way every year, so I can understand why someone would hate it. Generally it's best practice to substract the consumerism and capitalist hegemonic culture from a holiday and keep only the things of actual value. If that leaves nothing, ignore it best as possible.

Aesthetically it feels weird in the southern hemisphere, with all the fake snow and fireplaces while it's blazing hot.

But coming from a catholic upbringing it was a great moment to be forced to interact with all them relatives at least once a year. Nowadays I don't celebrate it much, so it's just a holiday for me.

I can understand hating it, though. It's a social convention forced upon all of us with no regard for us actually enjoying it. You can't easily "opt-out" of Christmas if it's important to people who are important to you.

I feel like Christmas just drags on forever. There are so many celebrations that I can't miss without upsetting someone.

Multiple family celebrations with family members that get close to a panic attack when something isn't perfect.

Mandatory fun times at the company.

Friends inviting to get-togethers that I would like to join but often not have the time or energy left and saying no and making excuses is draining too.

All of that during flu season.

We certainly do not need a day to celebrate christianity that's for sure

abolish christmas

return to yule

I like Christmas as an acceptable excuse to take a week long vacation to go spend time with family and childhood friends and eat a lot of food. Don't care about most other aspects. Kind of in line with Halloween. It may be overrated, but I still like it as an excuse to spend a night partying and hanging out with a larger and broader group of friends as an adult.

I LOVE Christmas. Growing up, my family used to spend the week at my grandparents' farm. All my aunts and uncles would make the trip, and it was the only time of year I'd get to see all my cousins. The farm itself was in the rural northern prairies so it was like something out of a storybook with all the snow and festivities. We'd see the northern lights almost every year, and it was remote enough that we could hear them. We are a musical family so we'd sing lots of carols. I've got a fondness for the religious ones. I've always thought they had a haunting, ethereal quality to them when compared to the secular ones. The only downside was that I don't like Anglo Canadian food that much. I'd have to live off mashed potatoes and cookies until we got home and I could return to my usual diet of curry lol

There are dozens of us, Dozens! Christmas is stupid. I can understand marking the solstice as the center of the season and the inflection of the daylight cycle. In places with harsh winter having a celebration to get distract from the gloom.

What christmas has become is just an abomination. Everyone says it is about the "spirit of giving" but for every person that gives someone else gets and selfish fucks all just want to get. That they claim its about jesus while stealing the icons from pagan festivals is disgusting too.

I got burnt out on Christmas years ago for several reasons.

One is that the entire culture around Christmas is incredibly stale, almost like it's frozen in time. It feels like nothing ever changes. We're listening to the same Christmas songs our grandparents listened to and the newer stuff isn't really any different from that. Christmas-related media in general always falls back on the same messaging and themes with nothing original going on anymore. It's almost like the entire holiday is stuck in a time capsule.

Another issue is it's become such a consumer-based holiday that it basically serves no cultural purpose anymore and is now devoid of soul. I genuinely think the secularization of the holiday was a bad thing in general not just because it replaced spirituality with consumerism but also because the excuse is that the holiday is now about "spending time with your family"; which is really just an insane thing to say when you think about it because it admits that we don't have time to spend with our families anymore. If we did Christmas wouldn't have been secularized at all but now it basically has to fill a niche that before capitalism would have just been like every day for most people and that's really fucked up.

Then there's the 'Northern Hemisphere' theming problem. I lived in Florida for about 10 years and let me tell you it's impossible to get into the Christmas spirit when it's 95F outside with 85% humidity, clear open skies and a bright blazing Sun, and nothing but green grass and palm trees far as the eye can see while people stroll about in tank tops and jean shorts - none of which fit into the iconography we as a society associate with Christmas. It really just doesn't feel like Christmas if there is no snow for snowball fights or cold weather to justify making a fire and sipping hot chocolate by or a big pine tree to decorate. The absence of all those things we associate with the holiday just presents a jarring effect.

Also related to the consumerism part is how omnipresent it is from the exact microsecond that Halloween ends. This is a common complaint about people who are sick of Christmas: how it gets shoved in our face long before the holiday even comes. 2 out of the 12 months of the year are dedicated to Christmas advertising and that gets extremely old extremely fast. A lot of it starts to bleed over into the January of the next year too which is even worse because then it's like 3 months every year where Christmas is the predominant talking point in our society and it's very easy to get worn out by it.

And in addition to that - and this also ties into the consumerism - is how Christmas is basically a symbol of capitalism now. It's been appropriated by the market to such a degree that it's almost impossible to disassociate it corporate hegemony over our culture. Everywhere it shows up it serves as a constant reminder that corporations control every one and everything and that capitalism is inescapable. As I got older and learned more about the world I went further and further Left in my beliefs until arriving at this point and throughout that journey I was being exposed to the understanding that corporations are evil, that capitalism is ruining my life, etc. and having this annual celebration that basically serves as a Christian Mass but for capital (and which forces itself onto your consciousness even outside of the actual Christmas season, as mentioned in the last paragraph) started really rubbing me the wrong way. This was especially true when I still was a Christian (it hits different when the holiday is important to your religion) but it remains true for me even after my apostasy.

Finally: I'm poor. I've always been poor. I'll probably always be poor. I was born into poverty and I'll likely die in poverty. A holiday centered entirely around gross amounts of spending on luxuries? You can imagine what my Christmas has been like consistently over the years. It didn't start off terrible but it definitely got worse as time went on as the number of gifts receded and so too did the number of gifters. I've barely gotten anything for Christmas the past 10 years or so and I'm honestly fine with that because I can't really afford to get gifts for a lot of people anymore anyway. This is just a "fuck you if you're poor" holiday at the end of it and that understandably doesn't create fond memories or leave a good impression.

Oh and partially related but my birthday is really close to Christmas so that fucked with the amount of gifts I got too which was not fun growing up.

So yeah, I'm pretty much done with Christmas now. I'm completely over it.

It depends on how Christmas is celebrated. Handmaking gifts would make an excellent Christmas! I dislike the decoration, tho.

Fun fact: Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate Christmas (or in this case, Yule) because they see it as pagan.

Christmas just feels like souless capitalistic consumerism. My relationship with it is pretty complicated due to growing up in poverty and how it has shaped my feelings on getting things. I don't think it's overrated though, i just think people think more people liek christmas than they do cause saying you don't like christmas in public is socially unacceptable. A good amount of people hate christmas cause they find it very stressful.

I hate the pressure to buy gifts and cards at holidays such as these, especially when you are low, or in my case, no income. Luckily most people abandoned me so I haven't really got anyone to buy anything for although I expect I'll have to get my landlady a card. Still, it's like the ultimate symbol of capitalism IMO, buying pointless nonsense that will go in the bin just because it's a certain date and there's social pressure to do so. I really feel for low income parents who have kids who want expensive crap and will be bullied at school if they don't get it. The entire thing is insanity and makes people's lives miserable just for corporate greed.

I kinda like Christmas, even though I'm an atheist. I just don't understand why some people go crazy about New Year's though.