Home For The Holidays (I stab-stab that song)

[plumtreeblossom]

I wish I could stop stressing about the coming snowstorm and my travel on Thursday. But then, there's ample reason to stress. There will be a snowstorm, and I will be traveling in it. Sure it's Amtrak, which is probably the form of transportation least affected by winter weather, but delays do happen. And it's a 2-legged connecting journey, with the small but present risk of getting stranded overnight in Albany. I'll just to have to suck it up and deal.

If I were Queen of the world, I would change two things about Christmas:

Reduce emphasis on gifting
Reduce emphasis on obligatory holiday travel

I'd keep all the music and beauty and food and merry parties and sparkling lights, but the gifting and travel would be right out. Not banned, but not forced upon our culture to such a degree that they become two of the worst stress-creators of the season. Nobody is expected to travel great distances to be with their families for Halloween. We simply enjoy it wherever we are. Christmas (and Thanksgiving, for that matter) could have the same low impact, if more people were allowed to feel comfortable visiting loved ones at other times of the year, and not having to cram with the teeming masses into overcrowded airports, losing their luggage, getting stranded, car breaking down, and all manner of hell in the name of a holiday. Will we ever reach a point where enough people have spent Christmas sleeping on airport floors that we can stop this nonsense? How many people have to die on congested, icy roads before we finally wise up?

In the above, by we I mean me. I'm following the lemmings, as I must every year. In a tiny family of only 4 people, anyone not there causes an OMFG FLIPOUT CATASTROPHY. It wouldn't matter if a category 5 hurricane was laying biblical waste to all things between Boston and Rochester. I would be expected to get there even if I had to para sail on a freezing gale of wind. If not, Emily would be put on the phone to sob and wail dramatically (which really happened once when I had missed my flight and no more were available until after Christmas. Thus was born my Amtrak tradition).

I hope everyone who's staying put, wherever you are, has a really wonderful Christmas or Winter Holiday of your choice, and I hope I do, too. I just wish it were simpler.

Comments

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Your mom sounds like a good reason for you to WANT to go. But blackmailing you into going is bad form from your relatives, and giving into emotional blackmail makes you feel bad. Can you focus on the reasons why you want to go, so that you'll feel like you're choosing to go, rather than being forced? Or can you stay at home for Christmas and visit your mother more often during the good-weather months?

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I go for my mother, because the holiday isn't very pleasant for her without me. When we were children, she made our Christmases truly spectacular. They were like dream Christmases. For all her work in making the childhood holiday wonderful for us, I go, because she can't do very much anymore.

The hassles of travel aside, it's easier now that I don't have to spend any time with my brother's putrid wife (long story, but they don't live together yet still have a husband-wife relationship. She isn't Emily's mother; that's someone else.). I flatly refused, and she stays away when I'm there. This is all to the good.

I'm nervous because I've been having some very non-positive feelings towards my niece. There's been more news about further foul behavior (I don't really want to go into it, because it makes me ill). I don't know if I'm going to be entirely comfortable around her this year. I'm going to try, though.

[oneagain.livejournal.com]

I deleted the last comment almost immediately after I wrote it because I think I made the mistake of mentioning something from a locked entry--my apologies. I was commiserating with you; I don't know if it helped, but that was the intent.