The Kind Of Bummer Holidays
Anonymous Writer, ‘21
November 2019
It’s that time of year again.
The holidays are coming around, and you can already feel the crisp New York Winter air swarming around you. We went from wearing light sweaters and jean jackets straight to heavy winter coats, only leaving you to wish for summer to come around again. When entering the building after going out for lunch, you may look like you’ve climbed a mountain due to the weird cold rainy weather we’ve been having lately. That weird slushy snow is soon to come, and the already delayed trains are ready to experience (you’ve guessed it) more delays. The holiday season is the period of the year in which we are supposed to experience some type of miracle. However, for the average person, there just isn’t the kind of Christmas magic you see in the movies.
For one, there isn't a mistletoe under every doorway and super generous people just handing out money to the poor. What you do see during the holidays is an even larger number of homeless people begging for money and food. And although one may argue that there are beautiful snowy days where the city is masked in a thin layer of white, that ‘thin’ layer of snow slowly turns to ice as the temperature continues to decrease. This causes an even more inconvenient daily routine during the ‘jolly’ holiday season.
Also, for most people the biggest parts of the holiday season are Christmas, gifts, and Black Friday. My biggest issue with Christmas is that large corporations teach people to equate happiness with gifts and buying things. Rather than spending time with family and equating happiness with family, people make it all about equating happiness to money spent. Parents are expected to spoil their children with presents even if they lack the funds to. This then makes parents feel bad if they don’t have money to afford gifts. Thus, these parents also have to find the lowest prices for gifts, and many struggle to do so.
With that comes Black Friday. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are days dedicated to the largest price cuts in the year in order to snag a good deal for Christmas. However, we’ve all seen those videos where hundreds of people are rushing into the store at once to get something. In reality, these ‘deals’ aren’t that good, but further, demonstrate the environment that has been developed in order to maintain the same holiday season mentality. The gift-giving exchange cloaked under a religious holiday is giving people an excuse to be selfish and conceited. People spend a lot of money on gifts for others in order to both maintain the same mentality of the holidays and in order to ensure a good gift for themselves. Thus, this shows that not much thought is going into these gifts and everyone is just buying into a materialist society. We are all a product of our surroundings which is expecting us to be consumers and we’ve built a holiday and even a season around this.
Overall, the holiday season is overrated. It may be semi-decent, but unless you live in a movie the season won’t be amazing. Prove me wrong . . .