Avert Your Eyes!

This is a grinchly post.

I'm not in the holiday mood. Whatever that is. I'm not happy about this Christmas at all.

I've tried. Really I have.

But.

I'm just not into it.

Let me count the ways:

On the parental end, I've got my Mother who overdramatizes every little thing. A simple Christmas Eve dinner with friends has bloomed into a Christmas Eve dinner party for 20. Not at her house, but at our friends house. The one friend has MS and is now confined to a scooter to get around. Their house is far more suited for the scooter than my Mother's, hence the decision to have it there. But of course, Moms is blowing it out of proportion, and her last email ended with, "Together we'll survive this." What the fuck? It's only a dinner party. Save the talk of surviving for something a little more serious, willya? Plus she's all hot to trot for me to make her jewelry for Christmas. Even though she's been making 'helpful' suggestions on making my jewelry better. I'm tempted to give her some beads and supplies and say, "Here. You do it. You seem to know what you're doing." But I won't.

And speaking of beads. A tad over 200 bucks in supplies later, the big PMC clay project I was working on is officially declared busted. I consulted with a local teacher of the art, and she said I was doing everything right. So I'm not sure why it didn't work out. I made it to the final stage of the project Sunday. It was being polished, and shined to be extra beautiful, and it broke. Yes. Broke. I just stood there with the two pieces in my hand. Then I took everything and put it away. By the end of Sunday afternoon, I had all the beads, tools, findings, clay, books, EVERYTHING in a big pile in the living room. Obbie came home and said, "Honey, what are you doing?" "I quit. Fuck this, I'm not an artist. I can't make anything. I quit." Which wigged him out pretty hard. Of course, he didn't offer an encouragement, or anything like that, he just looked at me. I spent 5 hours that day sorting and counting and repackaging a shitload of beads. I'm not quitting, just regrouping. Without beads, I'd be just Fat Amy. With beads, it's Fat Amy Who Makes Jewelry. It sounds a little better, I suppose.

After the great PMC clay project fuckup, money is rather tight this year. Tight for me anyway. There are lots of people out there who are in more dire straits than me, so I am not going to bitch and moan too much. I don't have kids and I don't have to worry about them getting a nice Christmas. Instead, I'm hoping the little bit of oil in the tank will stretch until the New Year when I can call in an order for the minimum. I am hoping that the small amount of gifts, both made and bought, will be enough for family and friends. I am hoping that fortunes will change for people near and dear to me.

Which leads me to the next reason.

The crass commercialism of Christmas. I work near two malls. Every day since Thanksgiving, the traffic has been madness. People are rude and boorish, both in vehicular traffic and on foot. Hurry, hurry, hurry! I can't tell you how many times I've had people cut out in front of me (very closely) or have ridden up my back bumper because I'm doing the speed limit. It's impossible to go anywhere at lunchtime because everyone is the world is using their lunch hour to 'get a little shopping done.' I don't know if it's because I'm kind of broke this year but the whole 'gotta buy it' mentality is really getting to me. Between people standing in line in tents overnight for a gamebox TOY, or pushing and shoving to get to a 250 dollar plastic horse, and the car ads touting 'Lexus, the perfect gift' and the 200 dollar phones 'that would make great stocking stuffers'....what the hell, people!!! Stocking stuffers are candy and trial size bottles of shampoo and funny little things! Not Razr phones for Cripes Sakes. This is absurd. We have turned into such a culture of grabby, greedy people we've lost sight of what Christmas is.

So basically, I'm over it. I may just go to church on Christmas eve and hope that the Christmas spirit will work its way into my nasty self. Because right now, I'm so blind by the whole disgusting mess that Silent Night, Holy Night is but a fond memory. I keep trying to go back to the Christmases of my yoot, but my Mother has managed to queer those for me as well. (Once I mentioned to her how cool it was that my Bro and I had such All American Christmases. She then informed me that I didn't know about the fighting, the drunks, the undercurrent of hatred that ran beneath what we kids thought was a great Christmas. Uh, thanks for that, Mom.)