Yes folks, it's that time of the year again; the time of happiness, gifts, peace and joy...
Or rather: artificial happiness, agressive commercials, politically correct peace which doesn't last long and most often fake joy.
Here in the Netherlands, we have two holidays in December: Sinterklaas (typical Dutch tradition) and Christmas.
Now don't get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with those things in itself. Sinterklaas is a Dutch tradition that has been around for hundreds of years, starting out with a noble cause; helping the needy. I'm not celebrating it anymore, due to the fact that I'm not a kid anymore (although I'm young at heart ;) ) and the whole thing of gift-giving kind of lost its charm somewhere down the road.
Christmas in itself hasn't anything going for me either (I'm not a religious person), but there are millions of Christians that do, and who am I to argue about that?
No, I don't really like the holidays because of commercialism, "mandatory" happiness and the ample supply of songs and tunes that are being pored over you, everywhere you go.
I ranted earlier about the
early supply of Shortbread and other Sinterklaas-related sweets, but you can choose to ignore that. The songs you can't ignore, unless you want to run around with earplugs.
When I went for groceries yesterday, the supermarket had a non-stop CD with Sinterklaas-songs running. I understand that this probably gets people in the mood for things to come, but they are very annoying. Lucky for me, I usually spend 15~30 minutes at most in a supermarket during the week; those guys and girls working there are getting battered with it; the whole fscking day, every single day. To me, that's torture, even though most of them claim not to hear them anymore after a while. ;)
Same thing will happen after Sinterklaas; some shops already are selling Christmas stuff like ornaments and lights and such, but their efforts usually double when Sinterklaas is over.
Another thing: record companies are apparently more into trying to protect their investments (whilst failing miserably) than getting some innovative and new music out; I can't remember a single recent Christmas song that made it to "evergreen"-status.
And so here we are; the growing commercialism and made-up happiness of the upcoming holidays make me feel sick to the stomach. It's sad, but I can't really do a thing about it, I guess.
Cheers, K.