Still musing about capitalism and holidays. I was at Cubs, and Christmas music was blaring from the overhead speaker. In November. No. Just–no. I mean, it’s better than the year I saw a Christmas ad in the first week of October, but not by much. Here is my post from yesterday.
I used to hate Christmas. I find it amusing that I wrote an article about the commercialism of Christmas when I was in high school–which was nearly forty years ago. I got some flak for that back then, and I still get it periodically throughout the years.
I don’t think I was ever really into Christmas. I liked the presents, of course, but the holiday itself was pretty fraught. I remember when I was seven or eight, I woke up fairly early and raced to my stocking. There was nothing in it, which crushed me. I went to my mother and told her about it. She told me to go back to bed and Santa would be there soon. A half hour later, the stocking was filled, and that’s when I realized that my mother was Santa. I didn’t believe after that.
My issues with Christmas didn’t really have to do with that, though. Nor with the fact that it’s a Christian holiday trying to masquerade as a secular one. I do have issues with that bit, but more because some Christians take such offense at ‘happy holiday’ and try so hard to feel persecuted as a majority.
My main issue was with tradition itself. This is a constant battle I have with my mother. She is Taiwanese by birth and it runs in her veins. In addition, her mother was really rigid as to what she thought was The Right Way To Be, and those ways were deeply, deeply sexist. DEEPLY. So much so, it’s embedded in my mother’s DNA. Here’s the irony. Both my grandmother and my mother were untraditional women. My grandmother was the first woman to attend a certain college in Japan and to be the equivalent of a senator in her prefecture in Taipei. At the same time, she espoused that women should stay home, have children, and always hyped up the men in her husband’s family.
Here’s the other irony. She had eight children–four boys and four girls. Of the four boys, only two weren’t completely screwed up. And only one made what you could arguably call a success of himself (the oldest). Of the girls, all of them have done well for themselves.
My mother continued the tradition of trumpeting traditional gender roles for boys and girls*. My brother was allowed to run around and be energetic. Granted, he was also on the spectrum, but that wasn’t well-known at the time so my mother didn’t know what to do about it.