One of the most striking memories I have of college is wandering out to north campus late at night, almost off campus altogether, and noting the sky. Across the street, you could see the stars. No light hit the grass or the parking lot of whatever industrial facility was over there. You turn back to campus, and the sky was instead an ugly haze of navy blue and orange from lights that only turned off when the sun was there to light things up instead.
I think about light pollution a lot. I don't like waste in any capacity, be it overstock products or just having to throw out food, but sensory pollution is a special kind of bad.
The store started playing Christmas music the other day, probably the day after Thanksgiving. The playlist is especially gross, this procession of Christmas classics updated for modern pop sensibilities, real pop diva belting out "Silent Night" hours. Oh, it's awful. I'm not one to complain about the store radio (in fact, I probably appreciate and pay attention to it more than anyone else in the store), but this seriously wore me out as Sunday night drew on. This is my entire month next month—even better, I'm working six days in a row starting Wednesday. That's Wednesday to the following Tuesday, with a single day off afterwards, and a boomerang shift Friday going into Saturday.
There used to be a sort of holyness to Christmas, a classy, hushed, almost sorta regal feeling to all the classic Christmas movies and music of the 50s and 60s. Snow-capped hills, everyone home, a certain warmth and magic in the air. Even if those are boomer inventions, it's a good vibe, one where you truly can appreciate everything you accomplished the prior year and who went through it with you. Further, there was space for the darkness in it as well (see It's a Wonderful Life). It might've been a time for celebration, but more than anything, it was a time—and sometimes, you're just going through some shit on Christmas, and that was okay.
In my lifetime, Christmas has become a gigantic blob of light pollution. Every day, every hour, is the ball dropping in Times Square. On TV, every commercial gains a bed of sleigh bells. Modern Christmas music is all blasted out pop music that remakes the same five or six public domain classics in increasingly garish ways—seriously, did I need a three minute party coda to an off-key rendition of "Feliz Navidad"? There's all this shit you gotta do at the end of the year, all the decoration setups that grow more intense and freakish, all the gift-giving when literally everyone expects it already, thus killing the surprise, all the emotional preparation I have to do in case I don't like a gift and have to pretend I do to be nice, it feels like a lot of obligation for very little payoff.
That's a good word for it, obligation. You can't opt out of it. Even if you don't personally observe Christmas, it is inescapable and it bleeds into November worse and worse every year. I wish we gave gifts throughout the year, as the mood strikes. I wish retail didn't completely change flavor the last two months out of the year. I wish there was Christmas music that wasn't so uniformly celebratory, not even necessarily dark or angsty, just exploring moods that aren't "it's time to pog the fuck out because it's Christmas". I wish there truly was a silent night! My ideal Christmas really is getting to stay in bed until it's dark out and then eating something tasty with like, one other person (Caby).
Every other holiday, we observe it by taking a rest. Christmas is a doer's holiday, whether or not you agreed to it.
I really want to like Christmas. I just have a lot of crappy memories attached to it. I'm also gonna miss potentially hearing "Real World" while I'm standing around cleaning up the store for a while.
