My Love/Hate Relationship with Christmas

I love Christmas, I love the lights, the music and the smells.  I definitely enjoy the tasty food.  I also love how it tends to bring out the best in people.  It can bring out the worst in some people as well, but I'm not going to spend time expounding that at the moment.  I think that it's a time of year when children get to really be children and believe in magic.  It's a time when adults get a chance to create a little magic not only for their children, but for their fellow man (ie, layaway angels I've been hearing on the news about).

It's a time to remember the Savior and to celebrate his birth (even if it didn't really happen in December, its nice to have a time set aside to celebrate it all the same).  It's when we all have something in tie us together, to remember that we ought to value one another as individuals with all of our differences.  To remember that we are all children of the same God, and to treat each other as such.

So, with so much awesomeness, what can there possibly be to hate about Christmas?  Well, it's a bit personal.  Very personal rather, I have been debating if I would post this, but writing seems to be very therapeutic to me to get things out.

Christmas is a time to be with family.  It's a time to celebrate family.  And sometimes for me it's a just a reminder that I come from a very dysfunctional family and don't really fit in anywhere.  I know everyone's families have their problems and have dysfunctional moments.  But mine really is.  I remember as a child I would sit at the kitchen window and dream about the day when I could just get in my car and drive away and never come back.  It's a horrible thing for a child to think, but I did.  I do not enjoy spending time at my parents house, it is so full of negative energy and bad memories.  The longer I am there the more I am down on myself and depressed.  I often leave feeling like I am only three inches tall.
I am so very different from anyone in my immediate family.  My mother and I in particular do not see eye to eye on, well, just about anything you can imagine.  I often feel that she is constantly irritated at me for everything I do.  I feel that she wants me to be one sort of person, but I am another entirely.  This may sound somewhat vague, I don't know, but the details I could on about would take days, weeks even to sort through.  But what I need to realize is that I am an adult and do not need my parents approval to feel like I am a good person, easier said than done.  

So when the holidays roll around, I generally enjoy them but I dread Christmas eve coming around.  I dread going to my parents house.  While living down south with no car, it was not too difficult for me to find excuses to stay.  I usually had a job that would not allow me to leave anyway, and everyone around me would say "Oh you poor thing!" but I never really minded staying to work every holiday.  Now I have a week off work and the holiday is fast approaching.  I love the holiday in general, but would gladly skip the actual day in a heartbeat.   

Hmmmm.......

Hmmmm well I have nothing too terribly exciting to blog about.  Life is pretty much the same.  I go to work, I go home, I get headaches more frequently again (not just little headaches, headaches that make me lock myself in a dark room headaches) but on the upside I have more days where I feel well enough to eat real food.  Meaning, anything other than jello, pudding or other soft and unsatisfying substance.  Hoping for good weather next weekend to go south for a day or two.  Warm weather sounds very enticing at the moment.

Speaking of the weather, I don't know if my memory is just faulty or what the deal is, but I do not really remember being this bitter cold in Cedar.  I'm sure it was to be honest, but I have just conveniently forgotten it as I've been gone for so long.  And in the heat of a southern summer it is very very easy to forget the bitterness of the wintertime.

However, I do seem to recall a few memorable winters in Utah's Dixie.  My sophmore year of college we had a bunch of people over to play games and a huge blizzard sprang up and some of the people ended up sleeping on our couch because they couldn't get their cars out.  A friend brought his truck over and pulled them out the next morning.
Another time there was a huge ice storm and everything was frozen solid.  I don't know how the driving was, I had no car.  But walking was fun.  Did I say walking? I meant sliding and skating on the frozen roads and sidewalks.
That same year our furnace broke, we had no heat.  It was COLD in that house.  Our bishop lent us his nice space heater and we slept in the living room near the space heater for a month.  We covered the doorways with blankets or something and just camped out in the family room, slept on the couches.  At the time I was highly miserable, being cold all the time and stuff, but I sometimes miss those days in some ways.  I miss the people more than the circumstances at any rate.
I remember dancing in the falling snow in the parking lot behind the Villa apts with an old boyfriend, and I remember making snowmen in the front yard with my roommates.  I also remember one night during a light snow storm I went on a walk with my roommates and we were running up our street falling into random yards making snow angels.
I also remember walking to work in snow so deep I was practically doing bunny hops through the knee high drifts.
All in all, snow isn't so bad.  I just dread driving in it, or having to trudge through it to get to work and then sit in my office in wet clothes for several hours.