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I have some strong contrarian opinions regarding holidays.
What better way to get people to shun me from those awful xmas parties then to rant about them here to the odd stranger on the internet I will likely never meet.
I've never really liked xmas. I first really got introduced to xmas on my religious elementary school where it was surrounded by a lot of rituals and other holiday festivities. (The school system in the Netherlands is rather different from the English systems. Elementary school is what I conceptualise everything before highschool to be as there is only one real category before highschool in the Netherlands) I didn't really mind them the first few years. After the 3rd time they started slowly to get on my nerves.
Then, as I entered wider society, I got positively sick of xmas due to the various parties I was required to attend due to dumb high school rules. Forcing me to have fun is a good way to get me to be extremely grumpy the entire time (this rant is a nice example of that). On top of that, the music was always way too loud. A few years later still -- after finally leaving highschool and going to college, the economic and religious implications of xmas started to sink in and I started to positively hate it -- I never paid too much attention the religious aspects of my elementary school as I had lost anything remotely resembling religious faith when I was 4 years old.
I consider it to be really quite sad that a quarter of the US economy depends on xmas. And then there is also the religious historical background of xmas being used to suppress the ancient Germanic cultures by the church.
The Netherlands is one of the few countries that still has something similar to xmas that isn't directly tied to the coca-cola mascot these days in the form of Sinterklaas. Instead it has it's roots partially in racism and slavery... One of those lovely things my country used to be horrifically good at (the VOC invented the stock market through it's slave fuelled empire)... It also has historically used to eradicate the local Germanic culture by the church. Still, I despise Sinterklaas as holiday a lot less as it hasn't been internationally commercialised to death. In fact, xmas is slowly getting more and more popular in the Netherlands.
At some point I started to look more critically at the other holidays I still tolerated without ranting everyone's ears off. Next on the chopping block was Halloween. Halloween used to not really be celebrated in the Netherlands. Instead there are two things that resemble Halloween quite closely. One being carnival, the other being Drie Koningen (directly translates to Three Kings).
What carnival tends to entail is city wide costume parties, parades with large silly looking wagons and people getting really fucking drunk on disgusting beer. Or at least in the lower half of the country. I've heard that the upper half isn't particularly big on carnival. Probably because it is historically protestant while the lower half is historically catholic.
Drie Koningen has kids going from door to door, singing for candy. It used to be celebrated yearly with up to dozen kids coming by my door every year but has slowly been disappearing. This is one of those things I also grew to despise due to its christian association and tedious yearly elementary school rituals. Still, not heavily commercialised and thus not too far at the top of my hate-boner-holiday list.
Right, back to Halloween. The entire reason I despise Halloween is because it exclusively appears as a commercial thing in the Netherlands. I like the idea of Halloween; the origins and such. But all, to me it boils down to is another excuse to get horribly drunk and/or buy shitty horror games for rather low prices. That is enough of a reason for me to despise it. I don't outright _hate_ it like xmas, but I could go without it.
If there's one thing I hate more then xmas, it's Black Friday. I didn't even know about it until it was commercialised to hell and back. The way I found out about it was another deep sale popping up on steam one day out of fucking nowhere. I'm sure there has to be some historical context to it, but it is even more lost to me than that of Halloween and xmas. In case of Halloween it has a history in relation to insurrectionists in Britain and in case of xmas it has been used as a way to enforce christianity. In case of Black Friday, all I know about it is that it's a marketing day. In other words, it boils down to "international capitalism day".
In summary, my holiday-hate-boner-list is as follows when it comes to the aforementioned holidays:
1. Black Friday
2. xmas
3. Halloween
4. Dutch Carnival
5. Drie Koningen
6. Sinterklaas (I even find myself liking some aspects of this holiday on an almost consistent basis)
Feel free to send shoot me an email message regarding your thoughts or my ignorance when it comes to Black Friday as it _almost_ interests me enough to look up any historical context.