Thanks to Eoink, Mike_S, TiberioMagadino and Ian2001 - I hope my comments ‘thinking out loud’ haven’t put a dampener on Martinzero’s thread, morose thoughts sometimes bubble to the surface…
I’d rather say that Christmas is being reclaimed as a mid-winter festival to celebrate the days getting longer again and general human bonhomie .
(Hope I haven’t breached forum rules here…)
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I’m not a huge fan of the whole xmas thing but my other half, her 3 adult daughters and their husbands plus 5 grandchildren all are so it’s going to be a tad busy on xmas day. My one concession is that I get to chose the meat and as I can’t stand turkey we alternate between pork and rib of beef. (it’s pork this year).
We always have an open house for our friends on Boxing Day and we’ll be cooking a large gammon as well as serving up the leftover pork and whatever our friends bring. If it’s dry I’ll probably cook something in the dutch oven. 5 couples have said yes so far and there’ll probably be a few more come the evening. Our spare bedroom has been booked so I suspect it will be a late night. Hic.
Have to agree, it’s become too secular, and the ‘retail opportunity’ issue really annoys me with ‘Mothering Sunday’, ‘Father’s Day’, Easter, Halloween etc etc
‘Mother’s Day’ had been a bone of contention for years with Mrs AC recently complaining that we’d been rushing to both sets of parents while she as a mother didn’t get a look in!
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The funny thing with Christmas is that the vast majority of the population seem to be able to down tools for up to a fortnight to indulge in a bit of festive family fun, there are however a significant number of people for whom Christmas with family is an occasional event as their jobs often mean they have to work at least some of the wider holiday often including Christmas Day/Boxing Day.
I couldn’t give a hoot about New Years Eve.
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I like N Year. A chance to reflect, count our blessings and plan ahead.
As an atheist married to a daughter of orthodox Jews Xmas loses importance. It seems to be rather forced on to those of other Faiths (and none). Perhaps they don’t want 2 weeks ‘downing tools’ in mid-winter?
Bruce
I have edited my original post heavily as it was rather too much against the positivity of this thread. Sorry
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Right there with you @BruceW. My wife is a medic and will be on call at the hospital where she works, for 13 or 14 hours on Xmas day. We don’t mind, as being of no particular religious faith but with leanings towards Paganism, we celebrate Yule, not Xmas.
Yule is still a low key thing, largely ignored by commercialism, and still of relevance today. No weight gain for us, and just a small meaningful gift to each other so no financial hurt either.
New Years Eve on the other hand is a bit of a shindig!!
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How many people get two weeks off at Christmas? I often take a bit of holiday to have the time between it and NY off, but my wife can only be off either Xmas or NY, generally alternating from year to year, and the years we go away to visit family the max is for 5 days!
As for NY, for me it is a damp squib, at least since I was in my mid 20s, before which it tended to be a night drinking too much in the pub, though I was the first in the area where I lived to do fireworks at midnight, having saved them since Nov 5th which then was the only time you could buy them. Some people make much of NY resolutions …which rarely lasy a month. Even if my wife is working Christmas eve and Day, we make Christmas special, and whatever days we meet up with family around then are always lovely.
I’m not sure that the view of most families being dysfunctional holds true, though maybe the benefit of just meeting up on special occasions is what makes it enjoyable: as I get older I savour more and more the time to catch up, but it is not just me - both of my 20-something sons enjoy meeting up with cousins in particular, though also aunts and uncles, and say they regret it in years where insufficient holiday prevents it.
One thing I omitted to mention in my original post is a practice that seems to have become a bitof a family tradition where the ‘kids’ are kids no longer: Christmas stockings! That is, for all: kids do for parents as parents do for kids. The aim is maximum happiness value, with time and thought -and love- going into the gifts rather than money - what will make someone smile, or really appreciate opening the gift? One year, in one part of the family that had just suffered job loss, the kids wrapped food -ordinary everyday food like potatoes and sprouts (individually wrapped) and a can of baked beans! The smiles and laughter and hugs that year probably beat any other.
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A lot of factories and businesses close down for 10-14 days at Xmas.
We close down from this Friday till the 6th of January. In Australia it’s summer holidays and a lot people are away till after Australia Day 26 of January.
Ah, very different from Britain!
Yep, sure is everything is the opposite. We envy the idea of a white Christmas, the closet we get is ash from raging bush fires.
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In most parts of Britain we also envy a white Christmas! Very rare to have snow, more often wet and windy, and very grey!
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Mrs Pete and I have always promised ourselves a trip north during Christmas to have least one white Christmas. So I’ll rule out the UK then as an option.
If you want a guaranteed snow you need to go really north and there is no daylight at this time of the year there…
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Maybe that’s a touch too north, looks beautiful though. My wife has recently been quite interested in the northern lights, so who knows I may just have to do what I’m told. 
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That’s 1000km north where I live. Here it’s dark, grey and wet. No promise of white Christmas this year – however we have that every now and then.
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Pete I believe you guys had the hottest day ever yesterday?
There was an article about a chap who’d cooked a joint of pork by simply leaving it in his car - temp got up to 80 C - he said he was doing it as an experiment to show the danger of leaving pets/kids in cars.
There is a sub-category of people like my younger brother who happily works over Christmas (on a cattle farm) because he gets paid double time and then in the evening drives 100 miles to our’s for his share of the food we prepared earlier for the gathered throng of more-leisured family members!
Best
David
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