Why I hate Christmas

December is here. The air is cold and crisp. Chestnut vendors have appeared on street corners, with their steel barrels filled with hot coals, roasting the nuts and filling the air with a delicious aroma. And all over the city lights are starting to appear over the streets, in shop windows, even hanging awkwardly from some balconies. It would all be fantastic if it wasn't a herald for the christmas season.
Yes. Christmas is coming, and I'm not very happy about it.
I know, I know... "Ryan, you're a grinch." Well, maybe I am. Sue me. Nothing like a lawsuit to celebrate the season.
I don't know when my "grinchness" started. When I was a child I loved christmas. I loved the lights, the repetitive songs, the presents, the family, the food. I loved decorating the tree and picking out presents. But sometime during my teen years it changed. I am not sure when. Perhaps it was the year my cousins moved away and suddenly christmas was a family-less affair. That probably had something to do with it. But I think I still loved christmas for several years after that. I think the fact that my dad hated so many things about the holidays also rubbed off on me as I got older. There were two things that put him in a guaranteed bad mood: tax paperwork, and putting up the christmas tree. We had one of those artificial trees that had a million parts that had to be clicked into place, fake interlocking branches and tree trunks. We never had real trees. In Spain trees are quite a bit more expensive than in America and they end up making a mess as they dry up. I think it was the latter reason more than the former. I would also like to think that we did it for ecological reasons, but I doubt it. Though as I got older I developed that appreciation on my own. My father also disliked christmas music. Now, here I can't blame him. I know a lot of people that are annoyed by the repetitiveness of christmas music. I am sure that some of my father's opinions took some of the glimmer away from the tinsel.
But mostly, I think I developed a dislike of the season on my own, once I hit high school. That is when you start getting idealistic opinions, and that is when I began assimilating many of mine. My dislike of Christmas grew as I started disliking consumerism, globalization and all that jazz. The thing I hate the most about the season is how a religious holiday was turned into an excuse for sales. I feel a bit of that righteous indignation that comes from seeing the temple turned into a marketplace. Strangely, this sentiment stayed with me during the most irreverent periods of my life. Spirituality has always been important to me and I hate to see it tarnished by the almighty dollar. That is why Christmas, with all its sales, catalogs, commercials, and stupid fictional characters and corresponding songs, has become an extreme source of irritation to me. The same would be true of any religious festival turned into an excuse to sell things. If Ramadan was a sales-fest, you can bet that I would be ranting about that as well. Christmas has literally turned into a sacrilege. And because the figure of Christ is important to me on a personal level, it only makes the affront more meaningful.
This is the first of many thoughts that I will write about this holiday season. Not all will be full of spite. Happy Holidays.