ewwwwwww that's wayyyyyyyyy too early

Nooooooooo!

I manage to love the holidays despite it all....sorry they're not as fun for you. Have you ever tried doing some volunteering this time of year? It helps a little. And you have music - that must be a nice aspect - no?

Evidently Pottery Barn believes that my Thanksgiving crockery is lacking. Am I overwhelmed? Not in the slightest.

The mister was whistling xmas songs yesterday. He's lucky he's so cute.

I love/hate this time of year. I have no boyfriend and no family I want anything to do with in the UK, so all the 'being with your loved ones' does get to me sometimes. On my walk home from the station I go down a road which has these lovely Edwardian houses with big bay windows, expensive family homes. The owners always put lovely, tasteful Christmas trees in the bay windows and middle-class untacky decorations, and I love to look into their homes as I walk by. It always makes me feel wistful, though, for something I don't have and probably never will.

I love seeing the decorations going up and getting the catalogues. Lakeland has been sending out Christmas catalogues for weeks now, each themed towards a different aspect of preparing the home and food for Christmas.

I like the Christmas music too, from the classical to the cheesy.

My sister asked me what I wanted for Christmas the other day. Nothing really. Nothing that she would choose anyway. She loves to have dozens of things to open on Christmas Day, but luckily her Spongebob mania continues unabated, so it should be easy enough to buy for her.

I have spent the last 3 Christmases all alone. I am tired of it, so I guess I'll have to grit my teeth and get on a plane and go have an expensive and unsatisfactory Christmas with family instead.

You know, if you don't have to stay home, what about going somewhere really interesting for Christmas, like Munich or Santa Fe? I've always wanted to see Las Posadas. That's always been my backup plan for any Christmases I don't want to be around for.

And again, definitely the volunteering. It's really something to spend Christmas Eve or Christmas Day with others who need to be with others.

I love Christmas in Florida with all the family, though it's not quite the same without one of my sisters (who is in China with her husband until next summer). I have a cousin due to give birth this Christmas, too, so there'll be the excitement of a new baby!

I'm with ya on feeling that this is way too early to begin thinking about Christmas. I don't begin the official celebrations until after Thanksgiving. Everything in due time.

Santa Fe is a wonderful city and Las Posadas looks great. Too much money for me to go there, though. I'll be lucky if I can afford to get to my mother's house.

Actually, I have spent time being with others who need to be with others, and unfortunately it doesn't work for me at all.

Maybe we should organize a BAH HUMBUG meetup for Christmas. :)

I guess. Sorry my ideas don't pan out for ya. I adore the winter holidays and wish I could carry everyone along in the enjoyment.

Actually yes, Miko, the music does go a long, long way, and that's good. But I'm getting into the whole "OMG I'm really never going to have children, and my one nephew is 3000 miles away" territory, which hopefully will pass in the next 10 years or so.

P.S. - I agree that it's too early for celebrating, but my relationship with the calendar for Christmas has really changed over the years. When I was younger, I postponed even thinking about it until Thanksgiving. But in the last decade or so, a combination of factors means I start thinking about it earlier. First is family complications - with a lot of family changes, we need to make plans earlier to be sure we get time with my brother and SIL and her family and other extended family. Since I often host Thanksgiving, the week before that holiday tends to get consumed with cleaning, cooking, and planning. There are certain things I really like to do every holiday season - a particular volunteer gig, a trip to see a museum theatre program and visit friends, baking, seasonal events that the nearby towns run - and in addition to that, with the field I'm in, we often have extra special events to put on and extra tasks associated with that. So if I don't look at the calendar and kind of plan ahead, the four or five weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas just zoom by and get eaten up.

So I've shifted my "don't think or talk about the holidays until after Thanksgiving" policy over the years in order to take care of a few things that you can get done early, like planning the calendar out, coordinating with people you want to see, buying stuff to cook with, pulling seasonal stuff out of storage. I really want to be able to enjoy the season (which I truly believe is a full season, in the old Nothern hemisphere agrarian pagan sense) without feeling like it blew by before I thought about it.

I'm not sure I'm gonna be lucky enough to have kids, either, and that is sobering. But if I don't, I'll definitely be seeking ways to get to know and get more involved with kids so I can have young people in my life. I always wanted to be a Girl Scout Leader, haven't yet had the time, but it has the potential to become a good outlet for the quasi-parenting urge.

Maybe we should organize a BAH HUMBUG meetup for Christmas. :)

Not a bad idea - pick a fab location that's easy to get to, and I bet you'd have some takers!~

Over the last decade, I finally sorted out a happy compromise with the very stressful and emotional winter holiday schedule. More importantly, my immediate family and friends had finally accepted that I'm really sticking to my scaled-down, modest, homemade gifts and celebrations.

... and then I married into a family with a very different and very definite idea of how to celebrate, and I'm having to renegotiate those boundaries all over again, but with a more enthusiastic and extravagant crowd, and a crowd in which I am an outsider. It's a real source of anxiety, for them and for me.

To cap it, my mother-in-law is a Christmas Eve baby, which means her birthday trumps all other Christmas plans, every year. My father-in-law's birthday falls on or around Thanksgiving. Between them, they kinda own the major winter holidays that my side celebrates. I don't begrudge them their birthday celebrations, of course --- it's just a complicating factor when we're trying to plan even-handedly.

One of my favorite things about Christmastime is the MeCha holiday card swap.

Because I have family in California, almost every Christmas has been spent there and every Thanksgiving has been spent alone or doing somewhat unorthodox things (karaoke all night, anyone?).

I do have family in the Bronx, and even if the new ex-bf lives on the opposite side of where my aunt lives, I'm not sure I want to go there because last year, I had some problems with the food and had to endure a 1.5 hour subway ride home in gut-wrenching agony...the rest of this memory is best left unmentioned.

If there are any "Bah, Turkey" MeFites in NYC, I would love to have a meetup. *whisks off to the IRL board*

And.... done.

One of my favorite things about Christmastime is the MeCha holiday card swap.

Me too!

I bought all my cards in January because I found a place that had loads of Christmas cards with bunnies on them! So everyone will be getting a bunny card this year.

I bought my cards last year in a Woot off.

Yay bunny card exchange!