As you unwrap the silver foil from the chocolate of your calendar throughout December (as so many of us will) understand that it’s probably happening about ½ billion times a day around the world.
Imagine the size of the pile of silver foil if it was all collected in one place.
I drove to Mansfield today to get some more bloods done to try to figure out what the f*ck is going on with this crazy thyroid sh*t that I’ve been walking side by side with since about March of this year and on my way to Kingsmill hospital I passed one of the Amazon depots.
It’s beyond vast.
We perch these on the side of town, out of site and out of mind because all we see of the Amazon depots are the 2 or 3 parcels that arrive at our house each day in December, not the 2 or 3 billion that arrive at other people’s houses.
Just because we’re not looking doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
The consumer side of Christmas is a con, it never makes us happy and it damages.
The music is wonderful, the lights are beautiful and the community with family is extraordinary – in the UK it’s one of the only times where almost everything stops.
None of us deserve a present though, there is no ‘deserve’. There’s only a tradition which has been turbocharged with the cocaine of hyper-consumerism to make us feel guilty if we’re not buying our children and our loved one’s expensive gifts to justify how we feel about them.
This ‘scrooge’ sensation has been growing in me for years and when I write about it or talk about it, people look at me with pity as if I am bitter and sad.
But I’m neither.
I will love the time I spend with my family this year, but I’ll try really hard, yet again, to detach myself a little bit more from the sh*t side of Christmas.
Happy advent.
Blog Post Number - 3283
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