dood learn to fucking read, my second post on this subject included: “Xmas-associated/seasonal gift-giving prior to the industrial revolution was scattered and a relatively minor aspect of the holiday.” But way to refute a point I wasn’t making.
The point I AM making is that the primacy currently assigned to gift-giving on Xmas is the result of market forces pushing consumerism, and that prior to those market forces coming to bear, gift-giving was a relatively minor practice in those handful of cultures where it was practiced at all.
but hey its the internet, nothing like a vicious argument over semantics
Xmas = CLASSIC
Having a Xmas birthday = FUCKING DUD :(
i hated christmas once.
then i grew up
now i make shit puns on the internet
i dont like christmas because i dont like winter and it reminds me of so many miserable christmases i’ve had before.
ken c OTM!
twice!
:P
I’m with Ed on this one.
We should make our festivals about feasting and dancing and drinking and generally having a big Saturnalia. And leave all this consumerist crap *and* the religious crap out of them.
The idea that folk memory can be divorced from religion and economics is risible.
I thought it was worth repeating.
Maybe for the idiotic masses who can’t survive without their opium and their bread and circuses but it works just fine for me and my elitist mates.
mmmmmmmm circus
i don’t think it can be. But this means that you’ve got to accept that midwinter bacchanalia goes back further than Bacchus. Christmas is the least ‘Christian’ Christian Holiday and always has been. Radical Christians have tried to get rid of it on a number of occasions, because it wasn’t a biblical holiday, because it was too pagan, because people were feasting and playing murderous games of football instead of fastin. It is so chocked full of non-christian traditions it’s a wonder Jesus get’s a look in at all, what with all the trees, crapping gnomes, fat beardy men, wizened witches, huge burning logs, highly spiced food and drink and all the things that go into ensuring the sun stops lurking by the horizon and gets on with a proper job of work of a day.
folk a folk memory, and all that stuff.
A gnome is going to crap in your shoe on january 6th.
Ed should be the new Horoscopes guy for the News Of The World.
trees, crapping gnomes, fat beardy men, wizened witches, huge burning logs
please to concrete over
Folk a “Jesus is the reason for the season” posters, cards, etc.
i like all the pagany stuff (without knowing enough about it)
what else is there to know? Putting trees inside your house, heating wine, telling children about a man who comes down your chimney.. I don’t see how any of this is really “suppressed”
Singing thinly veiled anthems to the Sun to make him come back and work properly again...
My brother was the choir director at St. James in NYC, and had a rather good choir. (Rich church=paid pros in the choir). He made a Christmas CD, but I can’t find the cover, so can’t give the full track listing. There is a rather rousing version of “Go, Tell it On The Mountain!”, with the kid choir bellowing out the chorus.
I, too, love “I Wonder as I Wander”, and some other weird ones, like “I Saw Three Ships”. I don’t understand “Three Ships”...but I like it.
“Good King Wenceslaus”—another fave, because, as the youngest of four, and the only girl, I always was the page.
I hate “Oh, Holy Night” unless Cher is singing it.
last year, i went to Christmas services at the congregational church, which was basically just a carol sing. Then I delivered altar flowers (poinsettias, natch) to shut-ins.
So...eating, drinking, and SINGING are the most important components of the holidays, i think.
“Joy To The World” is overdone, and much tougher to sing than most people realize until they start huffing through the “heav’n and nature” part, and suddenly have to jump an octave—generally, when sung in a group, you start losing singers during that part, and then they all come back for the top of the next verse. Which is funny.
i also like doing the community sing of “The Messiah”—much enthusiasm, a professional choir and orchestra to keep us all going, some people just dropping out and sitting down—so much fun.The olympics of Christmas singing.
I put together a whistling choir one year, I think another ilxor participated. We performed, impromptu, in the middle of town—nobody who saw us really understood what was going on.
Oh, I like all the vocal leaps in Joy To The World. Especially on the second verse, where it goes “and wonders of his love...” because I had a dog called Wonder who used to go nuts when I started singing “wuuu-UHN-ders wuuuu-uuuuu-uuuun-ders” and start howling.
Yes, singing is U&K at Xmas.
Maybe the rampant consumerism of Christmastime is just a modern iteration of the midwinter bacchanal—it’s another form of mass indulgence in excess, after all.
...yeah, just with a slightly longer hangover.
Maybe the rampant consumerism of Christmastime is just a modern iteration of the midwinter bacchanal—it’s another form of mass indulgence in excess, after all.
— cis boom bah (cispontin...), December 20th, 2006.
‘iteration’ is a weasel word innit!
i mean, NO basically. people rly overreact to the reformation, sometimes.
Yay for the “wuuu-uuuu-uuun-ders” of Wonder the Dog’s love!
On the pop side, I do like “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..” (The Christmas Song?), and White Christmas—but only once or twice per season, which means avoiding malls.
I expect to be roundly denounced for saying this, but I get a little choked up at the opening chords of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”—it’s an ’80’s thing.Plus Boy George followed by Simon LeBon followed by Bono....I always hear it in the car,on the radio, and end up singing along at the top of my lungs.
I spent Christmas aged 12–18 in Scotland, with my dad. “Mary’s Boychild” got played a lot—not so much in the states. Because I never hear it I have good memories of it. or maybe it is good.
iteration is not a weasel word
all my words are weasel words! Although in this case I used ‘iteration’ cos I couldn’t think of the word I meant.
What do you mean by ‘people overreact to the reformation’? I think the reformation was hugely important in the development of modern western capitalism (and in saying ‘the reformation’ I also mean the counter-reformation, and I think both of these were at least partly caused by nascent capitalism anyway), so maybe I’m overemphasising it there? Er, anyway, surely people celebrate big cultural festivals in a way that reflects their cultural standards/mores/values/etc? And we’re in a time where success can be measured in goods and in successfully-fulfilled social obligations, so why wouldn’t we emphasise them at a festival which—it seems to me—is about displaying excess in a time of scarcity. People aren’t just calling the sun back, winter’s surely a time when one would have been reliant on stored grain and cured meat, and the prospect of running out of both was very real. To have a bacchanal in the middle of winter is a gesture of defiance against the fear of future starvation, and a gesture of faith in the turning of the seasons and the return of spring. Given that, these days, most westerners are still getting fresh food in midwinter, and future bad harvests don’t have much of a meaning to us, surely we’re expressing something different, but using the same mechanism.
good god, some of you are serious grinches. who the fuck cares if its been commercialized BIG FUCKING DEAL.
uh you know what the thread is about right?
but the commercialisation of Christmas doesn’t really bother me anymore than the commercialisation of anything popular i should say.
So now, in the midst of serious crippling debt culture, people are expressing their defiance against the fear of even more crippling debt? A gesture of faith that money grows on trees, or they’ll win the lottery, or something else to justify these massive expression of living beyond one’s means?
yes very good.
iteration is a weasel word cos it sort of lets in a lot of parallelism and continuity-ism etc. it doesn’t explain, it can’t account for things. how could modern society be an ‘iteration’ of olden society. it mutated (well and truly) out of it.
when i say ‘overreact’ to the reformation i mean overreact as in they hate it so much they go over to weirdybeardy gnomes-n’-pagans shit.
xpost kate otm
xpost or that they will die and all their debts get written off.
it mutated (well and truly) out of it.
yes but it also repeats. people establish traditions such as Christmas largely so they can have something to carry out again and again as a means of stability. many things AROUND it change/mutate but not so much about it really.
Kate—I hadn’t got quite that far in my thinking yet! But, yeah, I think some of those things. And also just a general emphasising of the things in which you feel threatened by an uncaring, uncontrollable future—not just economically, socially and emotionally as well.
Enrique, I think the version of things in my head says “modern society and olden society r different iterations of the manifestation of human culture” but it’s entirely possible that I’m just misusing the word. Are you sure it’s a well-and-true mutation away?
I do dislike the implication that commercialism is something unnatural, something imposed-from-outside, rather than something that characterises our culture and which grew perfectly naturally from human society, and which will eventually be overtaken by something else. The “weirdybeardy gnomes-n’-pagans shit” kinda leaves me cold cos I don’t believe we can go back to any ‘purer’ way of life, if such ever existed, so it seems like so much futile chatter.
This thread is making me like christmas more!
Enrique, I think the version of things in my head says “modern society and olden society r different iterations of the manifestation of human culture”
yeah i don’t think that.
Are you sure it’s a well-and-true mutation away?
yeah!
i don’t think consumerism is ‘unnatural’ or an externally imposed thing. it has so transformed the world that i don’t think there are many things we have in common with the past — and even that doesn’t bother me; but it’s a cruel system based on economic exploitation of, at various points, slaves, the working class, and the third world.
Haha I just realized I have been mixing up “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” with “Good King Wenceslaus” ... they’re both sort of bellowy, male-part-of-the-choir songs.
“Page and monarch forth they went! Forth they went together! Through the rude wind’s wild lament, and the winter weather!”
My dad always sings out very harrumphy and gleefully at the “Bring me flesh and bring me wine! Bring me pine logs hither!!” part.
And of course the part where Wenceslaus tells his page to follow behind him and step in his footprints in the snow, to make it easier for him, saying that in doing so, the winter’s rage will “freeze thy blood less coldly”—genius.
Bring me pine logs hither!
If he was a truly good king he’s have been calling for Oak or Ash.
oh oh oh not implying that you did think consumerism was unnatural! just that it’s a thing that I infer a lot from people’s criticisms of the commercialisation of xmas, overreactions to the reformation, et cet, both from those who want MORE JESUS and those who want MORE PAGANRY.
I don’t agree that it’s a well-and-true mutation away at all! I think we’ve carried over so many institutions, so many traditions where even if the surface meaning has completely changed the underlying emotional need is the same, and we still have a great number of the same needs and desires and urges and so on, which still need to be dealt with, even if we’re using different tools. We haven’t had long enough to mutate out of the past, I think. (was there ever a non-cruel system? I suppose economic exploitation of another class/social group becomes more widespread under capitalism, and under consumerism the exploiting group seems to be getting larger and larger, but...)
xposts: Not just male-part-of-the-choir though, Tracer! The ladies get to sing the page’s part, preferably in the plummiest voices they can manage.
xpost maybe there were only pine trees.
Lots of conifers in the bohemian forests, of course he was using pine.
i bet he had some decent burning wood for his own fire.
The best thing about Christmas this year is our first real Christmas tree this year (bought in lieu of furniture) and just looking at it makes me feel festive.
The worst thing is trying to get the house organised. Most of our things are still in boxes, which are under boxes, between boxes and beside boxes. There are presents amongst them somewhere.
We tried to get the cable installed but the first appointment isn’t until January “because of Christmas”. Costing us a fortune in mobile bills.
Ordered a new front door, but can’t get it fitted until January “because of Christmas”. Grrrrrr.
But to be honest I think this is going to be my best Christmas ever.
no debts = collapse of western culture (UK and US GDP figures to thread please)
i was having the serious melt down, Christmas fucking sucks! sort of mental snap last year. Tried to convince my family that giving useless presents is wrong, we should contribute everything to a charity, only the kids (two nieces and one nephew) should get gifts.
i feel differently this year, but only because I’ve ignored everything except a couple of parties and the singing part.
I have purchased nothing. I know what I have to buy, and I’ll do so on Friday, mentally prepared to plunge in and purchase, not “shop”. For me, wandering around with other people in gigantic malls is soul deadening whatever the time of year—and worse now, because of the junk that’s being sold, and, yes, I can end up weeping on the couch because the toy aisles at Target, with all of the people with kids revealing all of the pathos of their home life right in front of the Bratz dolls, makes me feel sad and queasy.
Scrooge was a misanthrope. The message of that story is that community is important. i tend to believe that community is important—if only to experience it and bitterly report back on how much it sucked.
At least I tried!
i have had a lot of church in my life, so, while not being all that much of a churchie person, I grew up with the music, and the mysteries. So that’s what I enjoy. Especially the non-mysterious part of the hilarity that ensues when people try to sing together once a year.
Somebody stole the baby jesus from the creche again. last year, they stole the baby jesus, but that was the original baby jesus for the creche. (a ceramic baby jesus—the creche is all old, ceramic, life-size figurines. The original baby jesus grew up and became a carpenter and etc.—I’m glad i have corrected this, because i almost opened myself up to a huge hilarity on ilx. ) So the church replaced it with a doll. Stealing the baby jesus from the creche? I don’t know—I like pranks, and might have thought it was funny. “We got the baby jesus and we brought him to your house!” in the past, in my youth. But now I think I would be, um—faintly amused, and pissed off that i had to return it.
A camel has been stolen, as well. More confusing for the church, the police, and the press, because it’s a large, heavy camel (ceramic, I think.), which would involve a truck of some sort.
A menorah in Springfield ( a city near me, where my Mom lives, where i grew up), was vandalized. broken and spray painted with swastikas.
So, goodness, lots of people are reacting to this time of year in weird ways. Weird and violent ways.
I’m going to keep singing.
Stealing baby jesuses is a time-honoured bored punk kid tradition. I had a goth mate who had a whole posse of them! It got so bad at my mum’s old church that they used to nail the baby jesus to the creche.
Of course, this provoked endless hilarity—barely even born, and he’s already Nailed Right In.
I feel ya Rumpie—I’m in a new flat too and we don’t have jack sh*t for electronic amenities but I’m looking at it as a vacation from connectivity and it’s pretty cool, actually. (I’ve still got the radio!)
aimurchie you rock this thread.
“My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation...”
nail the baby jesus to the creche.
This make me laugh so much, especially about the stigmata.
Haha I just realized I have been mixing up “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” with “Good King Wenceslaus”
Ha. For a moment I thought you meant the Hemingway short story (a splendid antidote against merriment, btw).
Well, I do like giving gifts to people but I *hate* receiving what I’d call ‘obligation’ gifts. My mother and I have nearly come to blows over bad gifts on numerous occasions. We have always had good food, though, and that is the most important thing. Everyone makes a dish each and thusly Scandinavian potlach tradition marries up nicely to PRIME RIB.
My sister’s birthday was yesterday so the whole week is one long face-stuffing. I think I’m gonna call my cousin T and hit the road with him today; only three people left to find gifts for!
Oh yeah—Good King Wencelaus HAS to be one of the most pagan of carols. I think I was five when I first sang the page part. I’m sure the congregation was nervous about me remembering the words.
Plus, when you’re five, it’s a story that makes sense like a fairytale.
Singing to my big brother ‘Sire the night grows darker now, and the wind grows stronger. fails my heart, I know not how, I can go no longer.“ Knowing full well he would be giving me a noogie at some point soon, while we appeared to be angelic little children? Classic.
fuck, i guess i am getting a white x-mas. supposed to snow 2 feet today and tomorrow.
How thrilling! I long for deep fluffy snow.... probably won’t get any until March though—not quite Christmassy.
It’s cold enough for snow but the skies seem to have emptied after those 6 straight weeks of constant rain.
Good King Wenceylas isn’t at all pagan unless you consider saints to be christian/pagan syncretism! Story of GKW = Vaclav I of Bohemia is a saint (Christian monarch who died a martyr’s death at hands of pagan usurper), he does good works, he is capable of small miracles e.g. the places where he has trodden are warm due to ardour of sanctity or sth. Just cos there’s no Jesus doesn’t mean it’s not fundamentally Christian.
gosh I am really bringing the fascinating today.
“My life goes on, in endless song.
How can I keep from singing?”
There are some amazing versions of THAT song.
I only know the slow, lovely, folk version.
But i’ve heard a gospel version that was great!
I’m big fan of “Morning Has Broken” as a hymn. in a way, I think it could be a Christmas hymn/carol—also, a song lots of people know beyond “santa baby” and such.
Yusuf Islam made it popular, but it’s actually an old, Scottish hymn. The music is old. The words? Rabbie Burns?
“Morning has broken, like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning.
Praise for them springing, fresh from the world.”
It breaks my heart.
i really dont like snow when people expect you to come into work.
Morning Has Broken, definitely a hymn, not Scottish though.
Rick Wakeman! Ha ha.
i don’t think it can be. But this means that you’ve got to accept that midwinter bacchanalia goes back further than Bacchus. Christmas is the least ‘Christian’ Christian Holiday and always has been. Radical Christians have tried to get rid of it on a number of occasions, because it wasn’t a biblical holiday, because it was too pagan, because people were feasting and playing murderous games of football instead of fastin. It is so chocked full of non-christian traditions it’s a wonder Jesus get’s a look in at all, what with all the trees, crapping gnomes, fat beardy men, wizened witches, huge burning logs, highly spiced food and drink and all the things that go into ensuring the sun stops lurking by the horizon and gets on with a proper job of work of a day.
I thoroughly agree, actually, but now we have globalized, multi-cultural societies with remarkable amounts of individual societal freedom so that you can celebrate Xmas or not, you can turn it into a mad rush of consuemrism or just eat, drink and be merry, or both, or neither. Look at Xmas in Japan or Halloween in France or St Patrick’s Day here in the U.S. When British, say, society revolved essentially around agriculture, it was natural to show off one’s success by eating and drinking intemperately on the holiday intended to assuage the gloom of shorter, colder days. Now that agriculture is no longer the mainstay of the British economy, the consuemrist bacchanal that you have now is ‘normal’. Mind you, I don’t much like it, but I don’t think that makes it odd or unnatural.
Re: Morning Has Broken. It’s a tune, or maybe an air—it’s traditional. “Bunessan”. Gaelic. According to Wikipedia.
The lyrics? I don’t know. Probably not Rabbie Burns. So it’s an old Scottish air/tune that has become a hymn.
And one of my favorites.
For everything. If i ever get married, I want that to be part of the wedding.
Fuck this pagan shit, its almost as bad as the Xtian nonsense. Bludy hippies.
Put your hands up if you’re wishing for an non-religious midwinter overindulgent blowout and will be whingeing about hating New Year’s Eve in a week’s time.
*hands up*
If I can avoid over-drinking on NYE it should go down fine though.
I *LUUURRRRRVVVE* New Years. I’d have it every month if I could.
...but then again, I am just a big Pagan hippie.
i love christmas! and i’m jewish! and i think that’s why—growing up we didn’t have many non-jewish friends and yet i was still in the middle of this insanely xmas-fetishizing culture so i felt like i was pressed up against the glass watching everyone else have fun. i never got to have “bad” xmas experiences so my only associations are holiday specials and pretty lights and all that jazz. xmas rules.
I’m too old for fun new years. it’s sort of amateur night. BUT—they drop something from the top (two stories) of the pub in the middle of my small town at midnight, and I’ve never seen it, and thus don’t know what they drop. So i feel that i should wander down and see it.
The police put barriers up so everyone can gather. i shall report back and let you know what, exactly, falls down for new years. Hopefully not a government. or the baby jesus.
What shall i sing?
Oh, yeah.
Should Auld acquaintance be forgot...and never brought to mind?
There’s my Rabbie Burns!
aimurchie, the tune is a Gaelic air yes, but it didn’t become Morning Has Broken until someone put the words of Morning Has Broken to it. The link I posted (and other googleable references) show that that someone was not Robert Burns (it’s a bit twee for Burns, for a start) but an English woman (Eleanor Farjeon) in 1931.
If i ever get married, I want that to be part of the wedding.
There are wedding songs written to the same tune. I had one at my wedding. (this one, in fact)
My capacity for actually enjoying Christmas ended when I left home. Too many bad memories of my nutjobby Mom at her nutjobbiest. (Sorry, Mom, love you dearly, but you’re a little crazy, and I’m grateful for the distance.)
The only thing I really give a toss about anymore is buying prezzies for Ms. Cat. It’s especially significant this year as we’re still replacing some things of hers that were taken in the robbery.
Oh, and I like egg nog. And Toblerone, which I only really eat around this time of year. The rest of the holiday can take a flying leap.
thanks for the link, Ailsa!
I just ask for socks, Sharpies, unlined Moleskines, and Pilot thin felt-tip pens every year, and I NEVER GET THEM. They are seriously all I want. My family gets me ugly Old Navy ribbed sweaters. My sisters-in-law get me weird ass unwearable crocheted fishnetty socks from Anthropologie. My mom-in-law has caught on tho, and is getting me my true desires except for the socks. Plus some jewelry she stole from upscale shops! Yay!
I have $0.00 so I’m getting people all my favorite sci-fi paperbacks from the used book store, which lets you have a tab of up to $30. I’m painting the boy an awesome triptych about house tools. I also got him a bunch of old Dr. Who young adult novels at the bookstore.
I’m making Archie comics covers for my sisters in law. I’m making my mom-in-law a hagiography about her life, which has been hard and insane. I’m burning warez for my birth family.
I guess that’s what I like about Xmas, it kicks my ass into gear to make fun creative projects. I am proud how the only thing I’ve really had to pay for is shipping.
Every year I get to console my best friend for hours because it reminds her of times w/her schizophrenic mom. She can’t even see stills from Christmas Story w/out tearing up. So, that’s a very bittersweet Xmas tradition for 7 yrs plus now. :{
I love almost all Xmas hymns too. I’ve watched a ton in English & Spanish on the local UHF channels. I like also how all the signs on city streetlights have a big CHILI that says “Feliz Navidad” next to it. Better than the family tradition of going to the Mormon temple visitor’s center every year.
I may be missing the spirit of this thread.
I love when people just sing the first verse of Good King Wenceslas because then it’s just a song about a guy looking out a window.
not that i’m ignoring you, Abbott, but i’m cooking dinner and NEEd a link to “Do they Know It’s Christmas.” because ALL I’m getting is the 20 year sludge.
On the feast of Steven.
Movies for Grinches (comments great):
http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/12/5-for-day-countering-christmas-cheer.html
OK, fuck the link.
Abbott—I wish I had someone like you in my Christmas life! Archie comic presents? Rock on! all of your gifts sound amazing. And well thought out.
I like that Good King Wencelaus was just looking out the window as well.
Nobody has really commented on the three ships. Maybe he was looking for the three ships.
Good King Wenceslaus has derailed the thread.
I am now embracing my inner scrooge and here are the things I fucking hate about Christmas:
the sugarplum fairy music.
And random people wearing random santa hats.
But mostly the sugarplum fairy music. Who died and left the nutcracker fan boss?
Jesus?
OMG I hate Xmas playboy issues bcz it’s just secretaries & wives getting it on with gross, naked Santas & the punchlines are all, “Santa COMES but one a year.” Humiliating.
let’s get back to caroling. And hating/loving Xmas.
Our Alice came up with an extra verse for “We wish you a merry christmas” this morning:
“We get stressed when we go shopping
We get stressed when we go shopping
We get stressed when we go shopping
There’s nothing to get!”
(she swears she wrote it anyway)
That’s the chorus—she’s going to have to struggle with the verse. But well done Alice!
OMG I hate Xmas playboy issues bcz it’s just secretaries & wives getting it on with gross, naked Santas & the punchlines are all, “Santa COMES but one a year.” Humiliating.
hahaha, yes you can only see cartoons of santa getting head so many times . . .
I had a converstion with the Indian/Hindu owner of the liquour store. Last night. About his singing christmas tree.
I said “You know, that would drive me crazy. because i know all of the songs. I’d have to unplug it or something.”
We then had a long converstion about the calendar, and holidays, and birthdays, and I haven’t reached any conclusion except that we’re both in the business of liquor.
IF the singing christmas tree played the sugarplum fairy song, i would probably have unplugged the tree/killed a nice person who wanted, only wanted to buy some cheap beer. Just because.
fortunately, the singing christmas tree plays gentle, soothing carols.
“Away In The Manger”, “Silent Night”, and... “Joy To the World.” But only the first two measures.
It does not, as far as I can tell, sing “Oh Christmas Tree”.
the bar I used to work in had this stupid, maddening tree that would grow a face and start singing when you walked by. I freaking hated that thing.
Soz, can’t fully research right now but I think “Three Ships” is a Renaissance-era-ish thing from when there was a famine in a major city and the ships bearing new supplies arrived right around Christmas...? Sketchy, I know, but I have to go downstairs and play lushly arranged, sort of English-renaissance-y Christmas carols on piano. Vacation, what hey!
I am now hating Christmas too. My family is angry and depressed, and I was really looking forward to cooking exciting things for them but actually they’re really picky and just live off chips and won’t eat anything I make even if it’s really unexciting. It’s just an oppressively unhappy atmosphere, and now that I can’t even try to cook to cheer people up, I’m unhappy too. GREAT.
maria e—surely you can go somewhere and “sing”? Even if it’s the pub? or the bathroom? (Good acoustics!)
Singing doesn’t mean you have to sing carols—if your throat can’t sing maybe your soul can do it for you.
if your family can’t sing, sing for them.
You should make what YOU want to make, and hand it over as a gift. Food included.
or, alternatively, exchange presents and feel weird for years because of the lack of music, for you. IMHO.
Um, let me amend that post. Because it was obnoxious.
I’m getting to be a bit too enthusiastic on the singing part.
Apologies, maria-e.
It sounds horrible to have your kindness rejected. I am sorry that you have to deal with that.
I ended up crying last night because I was so frustrated that everyone else was so unceasingly and contagiously unhappy. Of course, that made it worse, and I feel really, really guilty now. At least everyone is a little calmer today. Only 3 more days to survive!
I don’t know about singing, but playing some happy music (Christmas or not) really couldn’t hurt! So that’s not a bad idea. Thanks.