Holidays – Holy Crap Not Again!

November 27, 2009 at 5:00 am | Posted in I'm just saying, insanity, rants, social comment | 4 Comments
Tags: Holidays, shopping, Thanksgiving, turkey day

I hate holidays, especially the ones that arrive as the year nears its end.  They are the absolute worse on the Honjii’s Horrible Holiday scale.  The day before Thanksgiving hordes of people collectively have a sudden realization that OH MY GOD tomorrow is a holiday, and feel the need to get into their cars, cause traffic jams, and descend upon every imaginable retail establishment where they stand, blocking aisles, looking vacantly off into space.  I know that it will be like this through the end of the year so I’m going to avoid stores even if it means I have to starve.

Hello people, these holidays come around every year, or did  you forget?  If you place so much importance on them that you have to shop and plan and stress; why then, year after year,  does it seem to come as a surprise on the day before Thanksgiving?  You all talk about it for weeks ahead, asking stupid questions like, “What are YOU doing for Turkey Day?” so you had to know it was coming.  Speaking of stupid holiday questions, one of my all time favorites is, “Are you ready for Christmas?”, to which I usually answer, hopefully, “NO, if I’m not ready will it not happen?”

Turkey Day?  The media has taken the one major secular holiday and turned it into a mass food fest, where largely obese Americans feel they deserve a guilt free pass to stuff themselves (more than they normally do) with a big dead bird and other strange dishes like candies mixed with vegetables.  This event often involves getting together with relatives people rarely see, and don’t much like, for a feast that often turns into arguments and petty squabbles while stuffing their pie holes as if preparing for an impending famine.  I suppose they can be thankful they only have to see each other once a year.

And, as if the stores and the traffic isn’t bad enough, even the gym is no longer sacred.  Right after Turkey Day and again after that whole New Year resolution thing about losing weight and getting in shape, the gym becomes uncomfortably crowded…for about a month or so, until the newbies figure out THIS IS GONNA TAKE SOME WORK… when it is blissfully turned back over to us die-hard gym rats.

When and why did the day after Thanksgiving come to be known as Black Friday, a day that retailers open their doors at insane o’clock in the wee hours of the morning for mobs of shoppers looking for good deals on stuff?  To me, the term Black Friday evokes a day of mourning or a remembrance of some past tragedy that happened on a Friday.  I hate to shop and only do it when absolutely necessary.  I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would get up at two AM to stand in line with a mob of people (some of whom are probably incubating the H1N1 flu) waiting for the doors to open so they can swoop in, like vultures, and be the first to pick over the LOW LOW LOW priced stuff to buy with money they probably don’t have.

This insanity will continue as we move toward the big one, Christmas.  The closer we get to the big day the more intense the frenzy becomes building to a crescendo on (when else) the day before, at which point I will want to hide in a cave until it’s over.

Did I mention that I hate holidays?  BAH HUMBUG!

I’m just saying.