kidventus's Journal: I hate Christmas

I hate Christmas.

Really, it's product placement. Miserable dark cold days where the sun never shines and just surviving is enough... if it were in the summer I may not be so harsh.. but the gifts are the worst.

Gifts, how bastardized it has become. You walk across a shop.. say for instance.. you see a brand new tee-shirt in August that screams... "Ryan Harne" and you buy it for him and surprise him with it.. no special time... that is a gift. You like him, you want him to be happy.. you were thinking about him.

However, this season that hijacks Jesus (the power of Christ compels you!.. to purchase this sweater from Old Navy) and all other manner of religion in to a capitalist mating call that drives all to the stores depresses me.

Even more so the many families who just get by, who provide for their children clothing and food just barely.. are now forced to lay out even more money to keep their children from feeling bad for themsleves.. how horrible that they have to feel like failures, that they can't whip out a charge card and buy the transformer of their kid's dreams (I know not what kids like now, but whatever it is it could never be as cool as transformers were in the 80s!)

Obligation is so damaging to one's own sincerity.

Yesterday I said good-bye to one of my friends who has been in the hospital for 31 days. He is going for three months 140 miles away to recover at his family's house and I will not see him through Thanksgiving or Chirstmas. He went in cause his appendix burst and has had complications ranging from intestines removed to infection. He's finally leaving. It was just him and I in the hospital room for a few hours and I took him in a wheel chair outside for the first time in a month to take in the damp, wet, cloudy, dreary fall day and he loved it having seen nothing but white walls. Later I grabbed his Garfield coloring book and crayons one of his friends got him as a semi-gag gift and colored in the most professional manner.. with shades and all.. garfield kicking Otis in the ass... I wrote "To Dan From Bruce" and showed it to him.. he said it was the best gift he'd gotten all year and taped it to the hospital wall and then took it home with him.

Gifts and days in which you give gifts are not to be scheduled like a hair-cut or a day off of work. You do not know when your Christmas will be, or when you will exchange the best gifts with each other, if you are lucky you will have many Christmases in a year. Gifts and the day you celebrate them and each other are wonderful, unpredictable and mysterious. Unfortunately for many who don't know this, the sale at The GAP does not speed along it's understanding.