I can appreciate the psychological and economic motivating factors for putting such emphasis on 'The Holidays' within the seasonal context of the miserable coldness of late November thru January 1st. We get less sunlight, we get depressed and our mammalian genes long for hibernation. That's no good for people who wish to make shitloads of money during those weeks. No good for industries that rely on those weeks for enormous amounts of their annual profits. Seasonal Affective Disorders be damned.
It's rather unfortunate that we cannot strike a balance between an economic and cultural hibernation and the suicidal mania that is our mechanized, modern mass-culture.
I find a tension between our natural neuro-biological state in December and the cultural narrative of Christmas: The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. We're told that its OK if you're not Christian, Jewish or religious. It's about family, community, compassion, selflessness and charitable, giving attitudes.
There are too many reasons to list why an individual might face great difficulty manifesting such happiness on any day of the year. Anyone who's grown up in a church has heard Christian leaders bemoaning the fact that Christmas has been overtaken by consumption; rather than overflowing goodwill and compassion in the midst of the snowy desert.
I assume that putting such collective stress on any month would cause an undermining factor to occur. It seems like this is a general consensus, too; due to the prevalence of the myth that suicide rates go up around Christmas. (A myth I accepted as true until I looked it up today.)
People have problems. In the US we cage more people per capita than any other country on the planet.
Today I worked both of my jobs and I've noticed a certain characteristic that spills out of some holiday shopper
The interaction varies somewhat. Some people thank you specifically for working on that day. Some people even patrol their city on Christmas giving out free food and/or gifts to open businesses. (I got a free pizza from a non-customer last year.) But some people apologize to you 'for having to work'.
Personally, I've given up Thanksgiving mostly due to our national history of Native Genocide. Thanksgiving has long felt to me to be a nice, political whitewashing of that history. I also dissent because of the nightmarish Black Friday cult. Following up a night of feasting in the name of family unity and giving thanks with a feverish morning of slave-labor plastic junk peddled by 1st world wage-slave laborers somehow strikes me as schizophrenic.
I've given up Christmas because I'm no longer a Christian. I also think life is far too weird to become an atheist. However, the more I look into biblical texts the more I find it difficult to not see the Yahweh of Abraham as a fucking sociopath. I doubt I'm alone on that.
I prefer to work on Thanksgiving and Christmas and get the higher pay-rate. Why not? It's a day like any other, regardless of how sacred the majority finds those days to be. Most of my coworkers have no interest in competing for those hours anyway. Even as I grew up in an evangelical family we downplayed the sacredness of the specific dates of holidays. We'd usually save our family rituals of gift-exchange for the most practical day. I've been working these days for years; they're simply not sacred to me and haven't been since I was a wee child.
