I have hated most holidays all my life. The only holiday I liked was Halloween, and it’s because black is a featured color. Plus, you can dress up in a costume as an adult and it’s not weird. That’s pretty cool. I did a bait-and-switch yesterday in that I was gonig to talk about holidays, but then ended up talking about bigots. I think it’s pretty clear how I got from one to the other because holidays are when bigots seem unavoidable. Or rather, when people feel pressured to spend time with faaaaaaamily.
I’m not saying bigots and family are the same thing. I am saying that they are often the same thing. I’m also saying it’s when you see the bigots in your family if you have to see them at all. This is one reason I don’t like tradition for the sake of tradition–it makes you do things you don’t want to do and it makes you the problem if you don’t. I mean, this is a problem with family, too, so it’s no surprise that when you put the two together, it just makes everything worse.
I think one of my issues with holidays/traditions is that they become so hardened over time. And they harken back to a time that people romanticize, but were not better for the majority of people. Any time people talk about the good old days, all I hear is “we don’t like diversity” or “we don’t realize that not everyone is like us”. It’s not surprising that most people who mourn for the good old days are white people. In America, I mean. Anyone being wistful for the sixties and is still alive to talk about it is most likely not a PoC or a queer person. Or, quite frankly, a woman.
Especially in this year, I have no tolerance for this bullshit. It disheartens me that I have to reiterate what I wrote about more than ten years ago when marriage equality was being debated. If someone does not believe that I deserve the same human rights as straight people, we cannot be friends. There is just no debating this.
I hate the framing of ‘this is just politics’. It’s not just politics. The political is, as the saying go, personal. If it didn’t have any impact in the real world, then we wouldn’t care about voting at all. (Not going to get into voting right now; I’m just not.) If it didn’t matter, there wouldn’t have been the Capitol attack. Only people who aren’t disadvantaged would say that politics don’t matter.
I don’t like having hate in my heart, but it’s where I am right now. I am old. I am tired. I went through hell with my medical crisis back in 2021–well, kind of. Not going to expand on that, either. This year has been a really shitty year. A very shitty year. I don’t want to talk about that, either, but it’s been such a downer of a year.
It’s bleak, man. Looking at the future is also bleak. I thought 2016 was dark days. Which, I hasten to add, it really was. I’m not going to look back and say, “Oh, it wasn’t that bad.” It was. The reason I’m feeling worse about it now is because there’s nothing holding him back. And because he has broken so many laws and got away with it. He’s not going to see a second in jail, and….
That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is knowing that–wait. This post is not about that. I want to get back on track so I will get into that later. I’m sure I will have plenty of opportunity to address that bullshit in the next four years.
Back to holidays. Here’s the thing. I don’t believe in tradition for the sake of “we’ve always done it this way”. Things can be bad even if someone has done it that way for hundreds of years (well, not them personally, but you know what I mean). If something is terrible, there is no reason to keep doing it for the sake of tradition. I’m not talking about baking an inedible fruitcake every year for Christmas, by the way. That kind of tradition is whatever. It’s not my thing, but it’s not offensive, either.
It’s when it gets into something that either makes people stress way the fuck out, like how everything has to be a certain way for Thanksgiving because that’s how we’ve always done it! Or things like “we have to open up Christmas presents at night because my family has done it this way for decades”. Again, that’s fine if it’s chill, but people get too caught up in shit like that and feel that the holiday is ruined if it doesn’t happen.
When I was in 9th grade, I was part of the school newspaper. I wrote editorials of which I remembered two. One was about the ‘best of’ voting that I considered a popularity contest, and the other (more relevant) one was how Christmas was so commercialized. Nearly forty years ago! I was a child then, and I did not know how good I had it.
I checked out on holidays a few years before the pandemic. I used to go to my brother’s for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it was pretty stilted every year. I always felt extraneous, even though I knew my brother appreciated me being there. Not only were holidays not my thing; I did not fit in well with my brother’s in-laws or his neighbors/friends.
As I have established, I’m not a normie. I did not know why for the first thirty-five years of my life. I just thought I was a loser who was not fit for American society. I actually thought I was toxic, but that’s a different post for different days. In my late thirties, I started to wonder if I was neurodivergent. Again, it wasn’t something that was bandied about at the time, and when it did start becoming more a part of the collective consciousness, it didn’t occur to me that it could refer to me. Why? Because ADHD, the primary one that was actually talked about, was always portrayed as something white boys had–and no one else. I am not white nor a man, so it didn’t enter my mind that maybe I had ADHD. Also, the ‘hyper’ part was emphasized repeatedly, and very few people noted that ADD was allso a thing.
This is as much as I want to write about today. I am inexplicably tired, so I will end this here. I will pick it up again tomorrow.