The Christmas Overwhelm

You cant find your keys. You lose your wallet. Your phone is ringing under the couch. The kids are still going to school in the dark. You don't sleep well. You trudge from one store to another. You watch your account vanish. You don't know what day it is. You know that Christmas is coming. You cant figure out who is coming to what. You are tense. Your wife is tense. You have given up on buying by lists and just grab stuff off the shelves. You are in Christmas Overwhelm.

And it is exhausting. No matter how many times you hit the gym you cant get clear. The house is a wreck. The car is full of presents. You don't know how much longer you can keep working under these conditions. Somebody is not coming to Christmas. Family members are mad. Kids are going to dance, cheer, football, play practice, choir. You go to choir recitals,  plays, band recitals. You go to games and your eyes droop.

And you don't watch television anymore. You watch Christmas movie after Xmas movie but you are shopping on your laptop so you only see some of it. You wonder where the regular world went. You push the bills to after Christmas. The stack is a small mountain. You push everything to after Christmas. And then the day arrives.

And like Chevy Chase at the end of Christmas Vacation you take a moment and say.,,,I did it. Amazing. Just amazing

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The Commoiciolism of the Holidays

Yeah commoicialims is the worst. Make a buck. Make a buck. Don't care what they stand for. Just make a buck. Make a buck. So says Alfred in Miracle on 34th Street with his New York Accent.  And  we know what he means watching the Macy Day parade where every float represents a brand or a product and we are hit with every Broadway show and every commercial. Make a buck. Make a buck. And you try and find some meaning in the Juggernaut of American Consumerism where everyone seems happy as pie spending a fortune on Black Friday.

And yet you feel uncomfortable with all of it. It couldn't have always been this way. Surely we are haunted with the thought there were simpler holidays where the true meaning of being together and enjoying family was preeminent. And so we look in the Christmas movies for some meaning or we see people we haven't seen all year and think well this is all good.

And we partake but we feel Alfred's frustrations as he vents about how Christmas seems buried under a corporate bent on selling as much as they can during out festive holiday. And maybe that is the way it always was but you like to think that the Macy Parade was really just a parade once of floats and bands and that the Friday after Thanksgiving was just a day. Of course Alfred was venting in 1942 about commoiciolisms.

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