What's the worst thing about Christmas?

[ClearWater]

Thank you. This is a forum, which means the conversation can be revived at any time, unlike an instant messenger. People come on at certain times of the day.

If its been 3 days or more since someone responded, then you shoule add our saved thought to revive it. But the point is please give others a chance to respond.

Okay.

 

[ClearWater]

Sorry.

 

[schaeffer]

People who won’t say what they want when asked.

I’m going to start threatening the ones on my Christmas list with getting socks and underwear for Christmas if they don’t offer suggestions.

Ditto, I did this, it DID help.

another thing that helped was going to the thrift store and finding something totally off the wall and wrapping it up for them.

One year I gave my daughter in law a five foot long stuffed caterpillar.

I did give her a little cash too, but it cured her of the “I don’t know what I want” syndrome…and it was really funny to watch her open it.

 

[bmaj]

What’s the worst thing about Christmas ?

Meeting family members ?

You end up doing all the cooking ?

You always get someone’s name wrong ?

You always forget something?

The sadness of recently losing a loved one, especially in the prior year, and not having them there to celebrate. Also hanging decorations on the tree or around the house that lost loved ones gave us and/or that remind us of them again. The older we get, the more lost loved ones we have, unfortunately. If we’re real fortunate, God gives us young ones, especially Grandchildren, to help bring an abundance of joy to our hearts until we meet all of our loved ones once again!

 

[schaeffer]

I really dislike the “Secret Santa” thing that some workplaces or clubs insist on.

I’m not talking about pulling a name in a family or close group of friends, but the “Buy a $10 dollar gift” for someone you barely know.

I especially hated this when it involved my three kids and their various classes at school, sports teams, extra curricular groups and clubs.

Some years each child had three Secret Santas to participate in!

 

[Faxero]

I get a little grinchy around Christmas time because money is always short (despite the fact that we save throughout the year for Christmas). There’s also the issue that there’s a big difference between being a child and getting to enjoy Christmas and being a parent and having to produce a Christmas for your children and others to enjoy. We do the traditional thing and decorate our tree on Christmas Eve, plus we do a special dinner, and Christmas Eve is invariably exhausting. We have started having the big kids help with gift-wrapping other people’s gifts, which does help a lot.

The thing is, it’s easy to say, well that’s not the true meaning of Christmas, but the true meaning of Christmas isn’t going to get a tree home, saw off the bottom, haul it in, mount it in the tree stand, decorate it, vacuum up all of the needles, buy gifts for everybody (my list has “just” 14 people on it), wrap them, clean up the torn wrapping paper and ribbons, assemble anything that needs to be assembled, shop for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner, cook Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner, clean up after Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner, and send out some sort of yearly communication to friends and family. And there’s a very hard deadline on a lot of this stuff. The way I feel about that side of Christmas, I’m pathetically grateful to my SIL who let us off the gift exchange hook this year. Thank you, SIL! I won’t forget it!

More humorously, last year I made the mistake of going to a mall Starbucks on the last shopping day before Christmas and getting trapped in the parking lot for 20 or 30 minutes because there was such heavy traffic that I wasn’t able to get across one of the lines of traffic at the mall. Oops.

*This is one of **many *aspects about parents which baffle me! Why the *heck *do most of you spent invest so much time and energy into events like Christmas when you are all already low on financial resources??? When I was growing up, my parents had the guts to not celebrate holidays or birthday parties, anniversaries or honeymoons… No trees, gifts, or wine; we simply brought cakes. We as a family didn’t bother to partake in these enjoyments, and we’re not even poor!

Isn’t it impractical to spend a day or so putting up decorations that will only stay up for 2 weeks a year??

Children can **sense **their parent’s stress! Your children might look happy on Christmas day, but that might be because they want to honor your labor, not because they particularly enjoy the celebrations! Maybe it’s both but still…

Don’t voice the “I love my children” platitude! In the long run, stressing yourself out unnecessarily is *not * loving *or *practical. Give me PRACTICAL reasons for laboring so hard just for 2-3 weeks of enjoyment!?!!!

If you are struggling to keep afloat, then don’t celebrate exhausting, time-consuming events such as holidays!?!

I really dislike the “Secret Santa” thing that some workplaces or clubs insist on.

I’m not talking about pulling a name in a family or close group of friends, but the “Buy a $10 dollar gift” for someone you barely know.

I especially hated this when it involved my three kids and their various classes at school, sports teams, extra curricular groups and clubs.

Some years each child had three Secret Santas to participate in!

WOW! What a W.A.S.T.E of time and money!!! To someone you barely know?? What if your gift goes to a potential criminal or some other degenerate?

 

[Xantippe]

Ditto, I did this, it DID help.

another thing that helped was going to the thrift store and finding something totally off the wall and wrapping it up for them.

One year I gave my daughter in law a five foot long stuffed caterpillar.

I did give her a little cash too, but it cured her of the “I don’t know what I want” syndrome…and it was really funny to watch her open it.

Funny!

 

[Xantippe]

*This is one of **many ***aspects about parents which baffle me! Why the *heck *do most of you spent invest so much time and energy into events like Christmas when you are all already low on financial resources??? When I was growing up, my parents had the guts to not celebrate holidays or birthday parties, anniversaries or honeymoons… No trees, gifts, or wine; we simply brought cakes. We as a family didn’t bother to partake in these enjoyments, and we’re not even poor!

**My parents almost never did home Christmases or birthdays. I can only recall a tree at home maybe once or twice during my entire childhood (and we lived on a farm and had literally hundreds of suitably-sized evergreens). We were poor, but not that poor–I’m sure lots of poorer people have nicer Christmases. They outsourced Christmas to our grandparents. If we happened to be home and the grandparents were away, there would almost never be any home effort at celebrating Christmas or our birthdays (and certainly never a birthday party with classmates invited). It didn’t kill us as kids that our parents were lazy about celebrations (although I can remember at least one rather sad birthday of mine where my mom made a simple cake and gave me maybe one present and my dad asked her why she bothered), but looking back, the non-celebrations one of the things my parents did that I can’t respect, and part of why I want to make an effort for our kids. (My dad isn’t quite the ogre that that story makes him sound like, but what he didn’t get was that it didn’t really matter to me that it was just a mix cake in a 13X9 pan with a little frosting and one stuffed cat pillow, which he thought really pitiful. The important thing was to make at least a little effort and to do it with a flourish. As somebody said, the thing is to do small acts with great love.)

I’ve since married into an Old Country family with lots of traditions, and while we do a streamlined version of the traditions (salmon rather than carp for Christmas Eve, etc.), it is very taxing. So I get why my parents were lazy about birthdays and Christmas. It is work.
**

 

[Xantippe]

Oh, here’s another grinchy gripe.

Now that so many people do online ordering of Christmas presents, there’s a tendency to get many non-wrapped mystery packages from family with no name of sender. So,

1. It’s impossible to thank the giver unless they ask, did you get the widget I sent? (Amazon has a feature where you can write a card to your recipient for free, so mystery gifts should not be happening as often as it does.)
2. It creates a bit of a moral dilemma with regard to what to do with the items, which do not arrive in suitable shape to go directly under the tree, as they’re arriving in padded envelopes and Amazon boxes. I sometimes just hand over the item to the kids as it arrives before Christmas (I’m doing that with a t-shirt that just came from a mystery giver). If I have suitable gift bags on hand, I can stick the gifts in gift bags without much trouble, but there have also been times when we laboriously wrapped the everloving Christmas gifts from various people. I have probably dozens of unwrapped gifts from grandma in my bedroom closet waiting to be processed in some fashion, and I am more than a little tempted to just stick them under the tree in their cardboard boxes, maybe with a bow stuck on top if I’m feeling extra diligent. Hey, if people wanted their gifts to us to be giftwrapped, they would have done it or paid Amazon to do so for them…

 

[pensmama87]

Oh, here’s another grinchy gripe.

Now that so many people do online ordering of Christmas presents, there’s a tendency to get many non-wrapped mystery packages from family with no name of sender. So,

1. It’s impossible to thank the giver unless they ask, did you get the widget I sent? (Amazon has a feature where you can write a card to your recipient for free, so mystery gifts should not be happening as often as it does.)

As far as Amazon goes, I’ve received several mystery gifts, where even if the sender did put the little note on, I never got it because there was no packing slip at all included with the shipment.

When I buy gifts for others online, I prefer to have things shipped to us, then I wrap them and send everything together if they need to be mailed. I usually refuse to order online unless I can get free shipping, so I’m only paying for it to be sent once. I find it even more baffling when presents are shipped to us from the store when I know we’re going to be seeing the people over the holidays. Even though we don’t do a ton of gifts, I find the kids enjoy much more opening one or two presents at a time, rather than everything at once.

 

[Xantippe]

As far as Amazon goes, I’ve received several mystery gifts, where even if the sender did put the little note on, I never got it because there was no packing slip at all included with the shipment.

When I buy gifts for others online, I prefer to have things shipped to us, then I wrap them and send everything together if they need to be mailed. I usually refuse to order online unless I can get free shipping, so I’m only paying for it to be sent once. I find it even more baffling when presents are shipped to us from the store when I know we’re going to be seeing the people over the holidays. Even though we don’t do a ton of gifts, I find the kids enjoy much more opening one or two presents at a time, rather than everything at once.

That last one is a problem. I remember once being at my oldest’s 2nd birthday at her great-grandma’s (God Bless grandma!) and she was able to happily open several gifts, but eventually she was exhausted by all of the opening.

First World Problems, I guess.

But, there is a strong case to be made for (ideally) spreading kids’ gifts over St. Nicholas’s, Christmas and Three Kings.

 

[EasterJoy]

…Isn’t it impractical to spend a day or so putting up decorations that will only stay up for 2 weeks a year??

Children can **sense **their parent’s stress! Your children might look happy on Christmas day, but that might be because they want to honor your labor, not because they particularly enjoy the celebrations! Maybe it’s both but still…

Don’t voice the “I love my children” platitude! In the long run, stressing yourself out unnecessarily is *not * loving *or *practical. Give me PRACTICAL reasons for laboring so hard just for 2-3 weeks of enjoyment!?!!!

If you are struggling to keep afloat, then don’t celebrate exhausting, time-consuming events such as holidays!?!

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”
“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”
Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”
“Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.
“What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.
“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”
“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”
“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
–A Christmas Carol, Stave I

“A small matter,” said the Ghost, “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”
“Small!” echoed Scrooge.
The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said,
“Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”
“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
He felt the Spirit’s glance, and stopped.
“What is the matter?” asked the Ghost.
“Nothing particular,” said Scrooge.
“Something, I think?” the Ghost insisted.
“No,” said Scrooge, “No. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That’s all.”
–A Christmas Carol, Stave II

There is a course in-between knocking yourself out and substituting a cake or nothing at all to stand in for all the trimmings that can be projected onto the observation of a family Christmas. For instance, if you get a four-foot tree instead of a 7-foot tree, it’s a lot easier and cheaper, and it still smells good. If you get no tree at all, when the day comes, you might find that you really miss it.

Why do it? Because when you let go of over-ambition and dial back to the level that is right for you, the effort and the modest monetary outlay involved is worth it. It is enjoyable to have the decorations up; they’re cheery. When you accept help and do things with people you love and decide you’re going to enjoy what you get whether or not it is “perfect,” it is a shared memory that you can enjoy long after everything goes back into the boxes.

IOW, the problem is not finding the time and money to make Christmas special. That does not have to take a lot of money. It is when you expect yourself to get ambitious beyond your capacity that it gets stressful for you, your bank account, and those around you.

 

[phil_at_dayboro]

*This is one of **many ***aspects about parents which baffle me! Why the *heck *do most of you spent invest so much time and energy into events like Christmas when you are all already low on financial resources??? When I was growing up, my parents had the guts to not celebrate holidays or birthday parties, anniversaries or honeymoons… No trees, gifts, or wine; we simply brought cakes. We as a family didn’t bother to partake in these enjoyments, and we’re not even poor!

Isn’t it impractical to spend a day or so putting up decorations that will only stay up for 2 weeks a year??

Children can **sense **their parent’s stress! Your children might look happy on Christmas day, but that might be because they want to honor your labor, not because they particularly enjoy the celebrations! Maybe it’s both but still…

Don’t voice the “I love my children” platitude! In the long run, stressing yourself out unnecessarily is *not * loving *or *practical. Give me PRACTICAL reasons for laboring so hard just for 2-3 weeks of enjoyment!?!!!

If you are struggling to keep afloat, then don’t celebrate exhausting, time-consuming events such as holidays!?!

WOW! What a W.A.S.T.E of time and money!!! To someone you barely know?? What if your gift goes to a potential criminal or some other degenerate?

You made some worthy comments, years ago when our sons were young,
We actually left Christmas decorations up all year long,
Much to the amusement of of there Friends,they loved coming over to see,
At the time we thought time went so fast, it wasn’t worth pulling everything down, because soon you had to put it all up again,

And each year I would take them to a pine Forest , and have a family debate as to which tree suited best,so that saved money,

 

[LongingSoul]

We actually left Christmas decorations up all year long,

We actually do that with our Christmas lights. Just leave them up and turn them on for special occasions and throughout the Christmas period. I like to weave them through the magnolia hedge in front of the house but have to replace them when my husband periodically slices through the wires connected to the solar panel with the whipper snipper. grrrr.

 

[phil_at_dayboro]

We actually do that with our Christmas lights. Just leave them up and turn them on for special occasions and throughout the Christmas period. I like to weave them through the magnolia hedge in front of the house but have to replace them when my husband periodically slices through the wires connected to the solar panel with the whipper snipper. grrrr.

Yes, but after a while you learn to move the wires,

 

[LongingSoul]

Yes, but after a while you learn to move the wires,

hmmm. You obviously haven’t seen my husbands slasher whipper snipper technique. Noone and nothing is safe.

 

[Ms_Manners]

I prefer a very simple Christmas, simple decorations, simple food, very symbolic gifts, if any. Midnight Mass with my husband is more valuable than anything anyone could ever buy.

I love Christmas as a religious holiday and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

But I dislike that it seems to be the last thing on most people’s minds.
Presents, food, decorations…
What will you get, what will you buy? What do you want? What will you eat, what will you make? How big is your Christmas tree, how many lights do you have and what effects?
It bothers me that people don’t even think about going to church, but will interrogate me about decorations and issue gift requests/shopping lists or talk about food a month in advance. (Here we put up decorations on Christmas Eve, with the exception of the Advent wreath.)

I dislike that people will gather under the excuse of celebrating Christmas and get drunk (at least two of my in-laws) and sing “King of Heaven is born” (rough translation, traditional) in between drinking songs. Being drunk is always bad, but to me singing hymns in such a state is just disgusting, slurring the Lord’s name… It makes me sad.

 

[schaeffer]

Gift wrap…I really like it and wish I was able to gift wrap all packages before sending. Sometimes it is really impractical. This year I did do this for my grandson, but my kiddos are going to have to hope Amazon remembered to put the gift slip in.

I had a gift sent to my daughter a few weeks ago, and she was asking around as to who had it sent to her.

Same with the round of Advent Calendars I had shipped to everyone.

This year due to health, family matters and a move the week after Christmas…I stream lined things. I’ll have to make up for it next year.

I really love to wrap the packages while listening to Christmas music and anticipating the delight the gifts will bring.

 

[schaeffer]

WOW! What a W.A.S.T.E of time and money!!! To someone you barely know?? What if your gift goes to a potential criminal or some other degenerate?

If it’s impractical to break the bank over buying presents for your own kids, it’s impractical to break the bank over buying them for 9 other kids on top of it.

Even if they are little angels from heaven!

 

[Faxero]

Why do it? Because when you let go of over-ambition and dial back to the level that is right for you, the effort and the modest monetary outlay involved is worth it. It is enjoyable to have the decorations up; they’re cheery. When you accept help and do things with people you love and decide you’re going to enjoy what you get whether or not it is “perfect,” it is a shared memory that you can enjoy long after everything goes back into the boxes.

IOW, the problem is not finding the time and money to make Christmas special. That does not have to take a lot of money. It is when you expect yourself to get ambitious beyond your capacity that it gets stressful for you, your bank account, and those around you.

…:idea:…

Thanks for posting those carols.

I prefer a very simple Christmas, simple decorations, simple food, very symbolic gifts, if any. Midnight Mass with my husband is more valuable than anything anyone could ever buy.

I love Christmas as a religious holiday and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

But I dislike that it seems to be the last thing on most people’s minds.
Presents, food, decorations…
What will you get, what will you buy? What do you want? What will you eat, what will you make? How big is your Christmas tree, how many lights do you have and what effects?

:yup:

It bothers me that people don’t even think about going to church, but will interrogate me about decorations and issue gift requests/shopping lists or talk about food a month in advance. (Here we put up decorations on Christmas Eve, with the exception of the Advent wreath.)

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