all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth
It's Christmas! This has to be the most enthusiastic I've been about it in years, suggesting that, in fact, my usual state of "Bah! Humbug" is actually a response to overload, which causes me to pull in my horns and retreat into my shell like a bad-tempered festive snail. With fangs. Good lord, now I have a mental image of myself as a giant, grumpy, six-foot-tall fanged snail in light-up reindeer horns. My subconcious has apparently been at the surrealists again.
Last night I had a very odd dream about hosting a very ill and exhausted Neil Gaiman* in a completely chaotic flat in the middle of town somewhere, with a house full of demanding children and domestic crises, including running out of food, money and a working car, and a pervading sense of worry that the wretched man was refusing to rest when he clearly needed it. I woke up a bit bemused and unable to account for the images, but on mature reflection it was, I think, at least partially a Christmas dream. Under the grad student lifestyle, with absolutely no disposable income, Christmas present buying was an annual terror; giant Christmases full of extended family and cast-in-stone ritual requiring enormous effort for incongruent emotional payback, has always been a bit of a terror. In an extended family without religious belief, Christmas nonetheless imposes an inexorable set of social and cultural expectations which roll, juggernaut-like, over the actual desires of anyone concerned. I actually quite like my family, but there's a slightly porcupine part of myself which bristles bad-temperedly when forced to interact with them according to a ritual script. (As it does with a lot of social ritual scripts, incidentally, viz. marriage).
My Christmas this year is a quiet backwater, located in a city whose usual buying frenzy and overstuffed tourist quotient has been severely clobbered by recession, and with vastly reduced family requirements owing to the absence of my mother, and my non-present-buying pact with my sister this year. Festivities have consisted of a very pleasant dinner with my sister on Monday night before her family took off for their usual Arniston jaunt; a random present for my Evil Landlord; and a series of quiet days at home playing Skyrim, baking, and pottering around in the garden. I cannot overstate how perfect this is for me, to the point where, as stated above, I'm bumbling around feeling quietly festive.
I am also looking forward to the incoming hordes at Boxing Day tomorrow with unrestrained glee; apparently all I need to do to content the anti-social-expectation inner porcupine is to displace the interaction onto a non-traditional day with non-rigid format involving non-traditional people. Score!
Happy festive wossname, everyone, and may the holidays (of which South Africans have a rather indecent amount this year) bring you seasonal cheer of a kind precisely tailored to your needs and desires.
* My subconscious uses Neil Gaiman as a dream image a lot. In the New Year I shall enlist my therapist to find out why the hell.
Last night I had a very odd dream about hosting a very ill and exhausted Neil Gaiman* in a completely chaotic flat in the middle of town somewhere, with a house full of demanding children and domestic crises, including running out of food, money and a working car, and a pervading sense of worry that the wretched man was refusing to rest when he clearly needed it. I woke up a bit bemused and unable to account for the images, but on mature reflection it was, I think, at least partially a Christmas dream. Under the grad student lifestyle, with absolutely no disposable income, Christmas present buying was an annual terror; giant Christmases full of extended family and cast-in-stone ritual requiring enormous effort for incongruent emotional payback, has always been a bit of a terror. In an extended family without religious belief, Christmas nonetheless imposes an inexorable set of social and cultural expectations which roll, juggernaut-like, over the actual desires of anyone concerned. I actually quite like my family, but there's a slightly porcupine part of myself which bristles bad-temperedly when forced to interact with them according to a ritual script. (As it does with a lot of social ritual scripts, incidentally, viz. marriage).
My Christmas this year is a quiet backwater, located in a city whose usual buying frenzy and overstuffed tourist quotient has been severely clobbered by recession, and with vastly reduced family requirements owing to the absence of my mother, and my non-present-buying pact with my sister this year. Festivities have consisted of a very pleasant dinner with my sister on Monday night before her family took off for their usual Arniston jaunt; a random present for my Evil Landlord; and a series of quiet days at home playing Skyrim, baking, and pottering around in the garden. I cannot overstate how perfect this is for me, to the point where, as stated above, I'm bumbling around feeling quietly festive.
I am also looking forward to the incoming hordes at Boxing Day tomorrow with unrestrained glee; apparently all I need to do to content the anti-social-expectation inner porcupine is to displace the interaction onto a non-traditional day with non-rigid format involving non-traditional people. Score!
Happy festive wossname, everyone, and may the holidays (of which South Africans have a rather indecent amount this year) bring you seasonal cheer of a kind precisely tailored to your needs and desires.
* My subconscious uses Neil Gaiman as a dream image a lot. In the New Year I shall enlist my therapist to find out why the hell.