Good morning friends! As I start this it is currently 10 am on the east coast, the date is Friday November 5 and based on the fact that I woke up thinking it was Saturday, I’m banking on a no-bones day. But whether it is or is not a no-bones day, I have recently been overcome with the will to choose violence so let’s go, let’s get after it, and let’s dive right the heck in.

Let’s get canceled before Christmas

Look, I get it, November first marks the first day of a glorious and misguided time for most of you. Pumpkin spice season is ending, peppermint season is beginning and while I sit here with a less than disgustingly joyous attitude, I realize that this may be the blog that gets me canceled because I’m about to make a very harsh statement based on a very unpopular and deeply personal belief.

That belief goes as follows:

Christmas or the Christmas season. Does not. And should not. Begin. ALMOST TWO MONTHS. Before the actual holiday. LET ALONE, AN ENTIRE MONTH. Before December. (And feel free to call me a grinch but here’s a few reasons why.)

1. There are multiple holidays that have nothing to do with the Christian faith that occur before December as well as in the month of December. (Ie. Diwali, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and Hanukkah to name a few)
2. Anyone who is even slightly less well adjusted than the misrepresented societal standard, needs a moment to deal with the fact that the sun not only decided to clock TF out when it comes to warming us all day but it also forgot its dimmer switch and decided to start hitting full snooze at 6pm. (So if you aren’t going to give me a day or two to recover from October as a whole, at the very least give me the courtesy of dealing with my Halloween hangover, before you indoctrinate me into celebrations I have no interest in supporting yet.
3. There’s specifically a book about the “12 days” of Christmas, not the 47 (give or take) so if there’s no songs or rhymes or abc family cartoons… hit pause.
4. (And arguably most damning) I have no desire to listen to Miriah Carey’s “all I want for…” for nearly as long as we are now making it acceptable – because frankly, I feel about that song the way most people feel about candy corn.

Now wait… pause… Before you pounce

I realize I just threw a lot at y’all and that I easily hit a few nerves so before you take a lunge for the jugular let’s get one thing straight. When it comes to the first item on my list, don’t get it twisted – I’m not trying to call this series of holidays the “holiday season”, I’m not trying to be excessively negative (even though it’s quite clear I am) I’m not even trying to tell people they can’t chase joy after a very long stretch of unprecedented sadness and hardships. What I am trying to do is maintain realism AND live in the moment because in my life I’ve wasted a lot of moments wishing I could get some really important ones back. So let’s take a side step and do this again….

FACT: I love the holidays (but also) FACT: this time of year isn’t the easiest for me

Growing up Christmas was always a magical time of year. I (and probably most of my peers) lived in a blissful state where our parents (and all the Jewish kids) openly lied to us about the only big boned individual that wasn’t openly criticized and vilified in Disney movies.

I loved the myth of Santa. I loved spending time with family that I didn’t otherwise get to see. I loved traditions and my aunt’s wedding soup. And frankly, I’m still incredibly blessed to be able to still have and still love those things but that being said, I do and I have and I will continue to love those things because they aren’t everyday occurrences. They’re brief and fleeting and special and they give me something so tangible and precious to hold on to and to look forward to – but they’re also not the only moments that matter.

So I guess what I’m saying isn’t that I don’t want the joy, and it isn’t even that it only belongs on specific days, it’s… for me, it’s the idea that I don’t want to cheapen an entire season by creating a countdown that implies that only a few select days matter, or that they matter exponentially more than the rest. And yes I realize that there are inherent contradictions in my argument but frankly it’s not cut and dry or black and white, it’s technicolor.

And more importantly it’s taking the time to understand that by the time fall hits (or any season hits) some people are already fighting incredibly hard just to get through the days or the weeks (especially during this time of year) so, adding to the noise and hysteria and giving us one more reason we “should” be happy, can make us all the more guilty that we’re not.

So let’s take a different approach… let’s talk about that aspect of extending the holidays and the impact of feeling like we “seasonal defectives” need to catch up to the joy.

When the seasons change – it’s a burden to be a burden

When the seasons shift some of us experience overwhelming emotions. The days are getting shorter the air is shifting and despite loving the cold and the winter I can feel my stress rising, I can feel myself wanting to isolate, and I can feel the madness approaching because at this point I basically run on solar power and the sun is out right quitting on me.

When the seasons change I turn into a bruised pear at a very pretentious supermarket, I start to feel empty, I start questioning myself more and more, I start tripping up on decisions because they have taken one too many turns on the spin cycle that is my brain and if you don’t feel like I’ve thrown too many analogy’s (without punctuation) at you and at this point of the paragraph, then you probably can identify with most of the points I’m trying to make and for that I am sorry.

But analogies aside, the biggest problem for me isn’t that I’m feeling these things. Its not feeling cold or cuddling into the darkness, it’s that talking about it, being a naysayer, being “that bitch” who doesn’t think “Christmas should be celebrated for two whole months” opens me up to criticism, because from the outside it looks like I’m trying to limit peoples joy, but on the inside I’m just trying desperately to catch up, respawn, and find my own.

And while I could read out the laundry list of disorders that cause me to feel less than joyous during the “happiest time of the year” it’s easier to write it all off. To tell you to run ahead and say that I’ll catch up when I’m ready.

So at the end of the day – I love the holidays, but I also don’t have the energy to maintain the kind of holiday spirit most people today have. And while, at one time in my life I could have easily identified as some weird version of the energizer bunny, my seasonal “defective” disorder drains too much of my battery to be on the level I feel obligated to be at.

In conclusion

To anyone who feels the need/desire to celebrate the countdown to Christmas, I solute you and I respect you (even if I don’t necessarily understand you). And while I’ve got a couple things to work on before I can join you, I promise I will… at the middle of next month when I find myself mentally capable, and the timing to be socially acceptable to do so.