I feel like doing a Christmas type post, especially after I realized how essay-like my last post was. (I can't help it, I've been reading nothing but formalist and deconstruction essays lately, my brain is processing everything in essay format)

So growing up, I never celebrated Christmas which is completely backwards because in the Philippines, Christmas season starts in September. (Once you get to the -ber months)We never celebrated Christmas because:

1) Jesus wasn't even born in December.

2) We were taught to celebrate his birthday everyday.

3) Christmas is nothing but a big marketing scheme.

This is why I've always had the concept that all Christmas songs were fake. I mean, if you get down to it, some of them are completely bogus, like:

1) Frosty the Snowman - what does that have to do with the birth of Christ?

2) I saw mom kiss Santa claus last night - Ditto

3) Jingle bells Batman smells, Robin Laid an egg/ Jingle bell rock - Ditto

4) Santa claus is coming to town - Ditto

I guess I've just had bad exposure to stupid Christmas (albeit catchy) songs. There are some legit ones like Silent Night and [Insert Legit Christmas Song Here Because I Am Blanking Out] which I guess are ok.

Also, there are some people who 'celebrate Christmas' who are not even Christians at all, which is great because then the economy is happy since we're all busy buying presents for everyone, but I've always thought that they were missing the whole point of Christmas.

I use to watch these special cartoon Christmas shows on t.v. when I was kid, and they always talked about the 'Christmas Spirit' which always ended up being warm hearted and having fuzzy feelings and being un-Scrooge like. I was confused because the 'Christmas Spirit' usually had nothing to do with Jesus' birthday.

So, then you might ask, who came up with the bogus idea of the 'Christmas Spirit' in the first place? According to my professor who thought it would be fun to make us read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens this past week, it was Charles Dickens himself. Apparently, he invented the 'Christmas Storybook' and after writing A Christmas Carol (party because he figured that every year whenever Christmas came around people would have to buy his book) he became known as 'Father Christmas' in a sense.

At the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge ends up giving Cratchit a big turkey (twice the size of tiny Tim) and a raise. This means that Christmas was all about spending money on extravagant things and being temporarily happy. This concept caught on, and today we still practice it.

Also, the Holiday season gives people extra excuse to be materialistic, making our ecological footprint even bigger than it already is. The other day at work, I placed an order for this dad who wanted to buy his 10 year old an ipod touch. (Where was my ipod touch when I was ten?!? Huh?!?)

Speaking of work, being in retail gives you twice as much of a reason to hate Christmas songs. We started to play Christmas songs after remembrance day. Let's say I have an 8 hour shift three times a week, that's 24 bloody hours of listening to a kid singing about his/her adulterous mom kissing santa under the mistletoe, and to jingle bell rocks, and about rudolf and that giant pimple on his nose, and reindeers dashing through the snow, and to whatever other Christmas song there is.

It's like being slowly tortured with each and every single song. And this is why I mainly dislike Christmas songs.

And I will end this by saying: bah humbug.