*Note: this was written on December 1. Today is just the day I started posting.
Hello, December. It seems like you were here only yesterday. Please, be gentle this year.
Soon, I’ll be begging once again for this time of year to be through. It always shows up so abruptly, as if we all speed through the rest of the year to reach it. Everyone wants to slow down and enjoy it once the time arrives, but no one ever does. We’re all too busy traveling, buying toys, and scheduling our plans to savor the fuzzy feelings that are supposed to be present. A self-anointed time of peace and good will turns to a chaotic, greed-fueled rat race. People who are calm and caring eleven months out of the year become crazed beasts; so wound-up and frantic they hardly resemble their normal selves. But, this is supposed to be a time of joy, so everyone fakes happy for a whole month. Imagine hordes of these anxiety-riddled people, filling every shop and highway. Those circumstances surely cannot be what make this the happiest time of the year.
Really, the promise of happiness is all we needed to succumb to this annual craze. Happiness is the best high you can get, and it’s legal, so we’re all addicted. Every vice known to man aspires for its user to reach it, and if they do, it becomes their vice. Religious leaders and salesmen use our moral needs against us more than ever in this month. They hold the key to what we all want, and that is happiness. Either through spiritual or creature comfort, they extort us through our addictions. Don’t let them fool you. Don’t believe for a second that this obligatory ritual of generosity makes you any better of a person. The act of buying presents for those you love is mandatory, and thus hollow. Hollow, like the whole idea of Christmas. Any act of kindness performed by a believer occurring in the time frame of this religious ritual is empty, without the believer portraying kindness in March, June, and November as well.
Funny to think how counterproductive this ideology becomes. Who can be trusted for being truly good and righteous when everyone is wearing their good people masks? For the next few weeks, no one will be able to tell the difference. Wife-beaters and rapists will be mistaken for good, honest folk, while real saints seem like they’re full of shit. The tides of morality are turned by mass suspicion. At first, you may trick yourself into enjoying this plastic euphoria, if only for the increased state of public decency. But after weeks of picking out who’s nice and who’s faking it like a sick, psychoanalytical Santa Claus, you’ll find yourself to be more skeptical and neurotic than you had ever imagined.
In the end, I realize that the Christmas season is morally uplifting, in an ass-backwards kind of way. This time of year makes one see that not everyone is truly kind, not everyone cares- even if they pretend to- and that makes those who do care all the more precious. To the same respect, one will realize that we won’t always be happy, and that’s okay. Happiness is a counterbalance to sadness. If one is not present, neither can exist. Happiness is just a moment of satisfaction, and it needs to be only that. If it lasted for long, let’s say an entire month, then the word itself loses all value. So if all the crazy people out there were happy, what would happy be?