Things I Hate About the Holidays. . . .

• Everyone feeling it necessary to get together this month, even if you see them every week (then can't we take a break during this busy time?) or if you only see them a few times a year (there ARE other times we could congregate. . .hello?!)
• Feeling like we have to buy and aquire stuff for people, and if you try to move away from that materialism by making gifts or not exchanging them, people reneg and buy YOU gifts anyway so you feel cheap, cheesy and thoughtless for not getting THEM something and around you go on the spiral whirlwind of our consumer-driven society.
• Watching Fox News gleefully cover fistfights at shopping malls over intensely desired toys.
• Hulabaloo over intensely desired "it" toys or gifts. i.e. this year's xbox.
  
• Feeling torn between families who want you all to themselves.
• Not minding a lack of religious observance, but having families who "fake" religious observance, only for the holidays. It's like, we never go to mass, but now on Christmas Eve all of the sudden it's SO important for us to go? Give me a break.
• Traveling. Thank god I won't be doing any until after Christmas proper.
• Seeing relatives you don't particularly like
• The music. First of all, I have it all memorized. I don't necessarily want to, that's just how my brain and music works. Secondly, they start in with it afterHalloween. Thirdly, Christmas music invented the remake. They'll take a song like "silver bells" and a hundred different performers have recorded it. You'll hear it hundreds of times by the time the holiday rolls around, and for me, three times per month per song is about my limit, even for non-holiday music. I just get bored of songs easily. I want a cease and desist on all Christmas music or, maybe I should just start wearing headphones everywhere.
  

I'm sure I'll think of more to add later, but this is all the humbugging I'll do for now. This time two years ago I was in an Atlanta theater's production of The Christmas Carol, and it was so much fun. Instead of worrying about holiday crap, we were in rehearsals, worrying about costume fittings. With such a large cast it was like a big holiday--we had a big potluck Christmas eve supper for that performance (we did three that day) and exchanged secret santa gifts. Oh, and my family was a few hundred miles away, so that always cuts down on obligations. I don't even think I did any cards.