Daily Thoughts

We don’t like to say it out loud, because the religious right will jump on us, but to many people, Christmas means nothing.

I’m not talking about Jews or Muslims or any other religion, I’m talking about those of us who are not Christians, and are sick and tired of the commercialism and hype.

Why would retailers depend on one day every year to save their a$$e$?? That’s not a good business model, believe me. If there was no Christmas, then maybe they would be finding other ways to make money all year long.

This country’s economy is way too dependent on holidays. All the big sales revolve around them. Why don’t they just have sales for sake of sales? I personally think they should just mark everything down 25% once a month. That would probably be much better than waiting for Christmas to bail them out.

Power companies LOVE Christmas! All those glowing lights line their pockets plenty, let me tell you, and they don’t need to get back into the red. The power companies are some of the most profitable businesses on earth.

Turkey and hog farmers love Christmas. Nothing wrong with helping out our farmers, though…except those heavily subsidized corporate farms that are taking our tax dollars every year.

Whatever happened to letting businesses thrive or fail on their own? Why does the government have to bail everybody out? Boy, the bailout was HUGE Christmas gift to the banks and auto industry, while millions of families sit and wait to lose their homes after the first of the year when the moratoriums on foreclosures expire.

I have closets full of Christmas stuff, because believe it or not, I used to love Christmas. That was then, when I believed that people were basically good. I don’t believe that anymore, and I refuse to participate in the farce anymore.

There is no peace on earth, goodwill to men. There is no Santa Claus. Christmas is just another day that Christians can pull out their holier than thou attitudes, and the stores can make us believe that we can buy the love of our friends and family by giving them gifts, while putting ourselves in debt.

And don’t tell me Christmas is about family. Most families don’t get along. So many people dread having to get together with their families on the holidays, but it’s left unsaid because…well…it’s the freaking holidays! Well, I’m saying it. I have no desire to see my family, holidays or not. I haven’t had much to do with them in the past 11 years, and don’t plan to have much to do with them anymore.

Christmas is a bunch of people trying to buy love from people who don’t give a damn about them in the first place.

It’s just another day, people, and it’s a made up day at that. If there was a Jesus (which is debateable by many religious scholars), he was born in August.

I’m a little TOO honest sometimes. I tend to just say (or type) what’s on my mind, without cranking up my moral editor first. Honesty is a good thing, when tempered with kindness, but there’s the rub. Most of the time, when we’re being brutally honest, we’re also angry or hurt. It’s very difficult to not be cruel when we’re hurting and want to strike back.

It seems that in my life, I’ve sometimes taken subtle cruelty to an art form.

I learned under the unwitting tutelage of my mother (God rest her soul), who, while being the woman I loved most in the world, many times took a perverse pleasure in hurting other people. She was not bold enough to just say things to people’s faces, though. She would stand aside, just within earshot, and talk in a loud voice, saying the most horrific, hurtful things. Or she would resort to veiled criticism, which sometimes was the worst.

An example of her cruelty was what she did to my sisters and me. For all of our lives, she took pleasure in playing us one against the other, making us each hate the other for no reason other than what she led us to believe. It changed us. It somehow turned us into what she thought we were. I was the “crazy” one (I was actually the most sane, but nevermind that), my older sister was the stupid one (she had more common and money sense than any of us), and my oldest sister was the responsible one (I don’t even want to go there).

The saddest part of all of this is that while my other two sisters hated me, I didn’t hate them. In fact, all I ever wanted was for them to love me, and I spent 40 years of my life trying to achieve that before finally giving up. It was too late by then. The roles were set, the lines were drawn, and the rift between us would never be crossed.

My mother recently died. Her legacy will be that my sister and I, the only remaining living siblings, will never speak to each other again. The wounds cannot be healed anymore. There are too many, and they are too deep. We both know that this was done to us, but now, it’s embedded too deep in our psyches to ever be healed. When my mother died, I became an orphan.

But like I’ve always said, sometimes good comes out of the worst situations. My mother’s family — my aunt and her children — rallied around me and gave me an anchor, just when I needed one the most. My sister would say they are not worth having as relatives, because she thinks my aunt and her children are trash, and has said so on many occasions. So like I used to say to my son when he didn’t like something I was serving for dinner, “Good, more for me!”

Love isn’t something you can just dole out when you want to gain something from it. Unfortunately, my sister doesn’t seem to be able to learn that. At 68, she still blames everything in her life on the fact that I was born, and that she didn’t get to go to college right out of high school. It’s sad, really. For someone so intelligent, she is truly ignorant of the realities of life.

And the saddest part is that we can all see what she can’t — that she is EXACTLY like my mother.