It is 8:15 AM on Friday, January 3rd 2025. The morning is gray with a slight drizzle and ample fog which precedes heavy rainfall later this morning. The day after Christmas, most of the nation was in a sort of “work Purgatory,” with only a small reprieve on New Year’s Day which fell on Wednesday. Nobody wanted to work, but had to at least stand ready to respond to those festive work go-getters, those performative grinders, whom should be taken off everyone’s Christmas card lists for such an affront. Some companies shut down completely and many people take off work until next Monday but for those who cannot, perhaps sending out work for others might be done in spite?
In any case, the holidays are over and the post-holiday depression looms large. It is my opinion that anyone who sends work before Monday half does so in the hopes of speeding up that depression.
As for me, the years now go by in a blur so as soon as one holiday season ends, there will be some activity, a summer will occur and the holidays will begin again. Time moves on as it always does. I’ve always felt it important to capture the special moments of the holiday season so we can look back and appreciate them. I record Christmas on both my security camera and seeing that the quality wasn’t great, have started to do so on my phone as well. This allows us to have a glimpse back into the past which I find to be a wonderful treasure. After all, how many of us can remember most Christmases past, at all let alone the details? Those events fade from our minds completely over time and are gone.
Yesterday in the early morning, when I take the puppy out to do her business I had a poetic moment as I looked through the window at the Christmas tree and kitchen still decorated with Christmas lights. It seemed to me like a metaphor for watching my old Christmas videos. Those events were in the past and all I could do, was look at them fondly through recorded media just as I was looking at our decorations through a window from the outside as I remembered Christmas Day. Yesterday was the last day for those decorations as we always put them away the day after the New Year. After Christmas they just become a sad reminder that the event is over. We’ll never have the same type of Christmas again for the simple fact that the kids will grow older, their interests will change, we’ll no longer receive Christmas cards from some acquaintances whose bonds of friendship have faded, and who can say how our lives will change in the new year.
So, I’ll wrap up this post, get dressed, turn on my work computer and stand at attention as I lament the last, sad throes of the holiday as one would look at a patient taking his last breaths. Those who send e-mails or create work today are like those who would advocate for pulling the plug on our poor patient prematurely and dumping him in the ground.
Before I go, I’d also like to mention how sorry I feel for those poor adolescent fir trees who had their lives cut short in the hopes of becoming a Christmas tree to be admired before they die completely. Instead, they didn’t get picked and now sit cold and lonely in a muddy lot waiting to be thrown away. All living Christmas trees eventually end up thrown out but I feel especially bad for those in those cold, empty lots.
Monday will come and we’ll all get back to the business of hyper-capitalism where any momentary goodwill towards fellow man and reminders of “keeping Christmas in your heart all year long” quickly vanishes in a flurry of e-mails, meetings, trainings and general business, where the phrase above is replaced with “a sense of urgency,” and whichever business buzzwords are dragged in by the infant New Year baby.
Sigh.
