Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

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Kullman
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Kullman » Sat Dec 24, 2022 10:23 am

Not really.

I enjoy meeting with the family, but we also meet numerous times during the summer.

I'm also agnostic (even if the statistics count me as a catholic), so there is not a religious interest either...
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby lavengro » Sat Dec 24, 2022 2:48 pm

I have loads and loads and loads of secular Christmas spirt. I recognize that for some, Christmas is a challenging time of year but in my experience I generally see a significant increase in how well people interact with each other over say the two weeks leading up to Christmas and during the interregnum between Christmas and New Year's eve. Followed predictably by one day of a massive hang-over, two weeks of luke-warm but doomed-to-failure attempts to stick with New Year's resolutions, then a return to usual (and in my view over the last say ten years, often increasingly poor) behaviour. It has always been my favourite time of year, even more so now that I no longer live in snowy Winterpeg.

I tend towards anti-materialism, but if you are inclined to get me a Christmas present, my favourite colour is blue. Unless you are getting me a Lamborghini, in which case ya gotta go with yellow.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Le Baron » Sat Dec 24, 2022 5:59 pm

Blast, I got you a blue Lamborghini. I'll have to take it back now.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Radioclare » Sat Dec 24, 2022 11:19 pm

Christmas is a religious thing for me but that aside, I think it's the best time of the year for people with office jobs. At least in the UK, it's the one time of the year when everyone, clients and colleagues alike, is guaranteed to be on holiday at exactly the same time and no one expects you to do anything at all. For a few days you can safely ignore your email, knowing that no one will expect you to be contactable, and you're unlikely to find you've missed much email anyway when you get back to work in January :D That's a contrast to summer holidays when everyone takes different weeks and you can come back to hundreds of misses messages and crises in your inbox.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Sae » Sun Dec 25, 2022 12:11 pm

I said we don't watch TV on Christmas day, we might break that tradition this year because we are considering having a marathon of the greatest Christmas movie, Die Hard.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Dec 25, 2022 4:59 pm

Unfortunately one of the things which brings down this season for me here is the annoying Dutch addiction to setting off fireworks. Yesterday and today bomb-like fireworks have gone off nearby and you see frightened cats shooting out of wherever they've been hiding. They're so afraid they get confused and won't even go indoors because they think they're under threat.

The authorities have done nothing about this for years. Despite growing dislike and impatience. The right-wing government prefers to pretend it's a 'freedom' issue. Freedom to be a public nuisance and make everyone else's day a misery.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Doitsujin » Sun Dec 25, 2022 7:09 pm

Sae wrote:I said we don't watch TV on Christmas day, we might break that tradition this year because we are considering having a marathon of the greatest Christmas movie, Die Hard.
Fun fact: in the German version, Bruce Willis screams, "Yippee A Yeh Du Schweinebacke [=pig's jaw/cheek]!"

("Schweinebacke" is one of the lesser German insults; it's often translated as bastard or dirtbag.)
For more dubbing tidbits see the following article: How do you say "Argo f--- yourself" in 40 languages?
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Sae » Sun Dec 25, 2022 10:27 pm

Doitsujin wrote:
Sae wrote:I said we don't watch TV on Christmas day, we might break that tradition this year because we are considering having a marathon of the greatest Christmas movie, Die Hard.
Fun fact: in the German version, Bruce Willis screams, "Yippee A Yeh Du Schweinebacke [=pig's jaw/cheek]!"

("Schweinebacke" is one of the lesser German insults; it's often translated as bastard or dirtbag.)
For more dubbing tidbits see the following article: How do you say "Argo f--- yourself" in 40 languages?


Beautiful. It rolls off in the same way and probably works in that way. I've not really watched any German dubs for stuff, but I learned the German version of the Spiderpig song from The Simpsons Movie for some reason.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby garyb » Mon Dec 26, 2022 10:57 am

It was fun as a kid. Now my family doesn't make a big deal of it (thankfully, since all the preparation and shopping can be quite stressful) but it's a good excuse to slow down and relax for a few days and spend time with people.

I do enjoy a good Christmas market. My city used to have an authentic German market, but about ten years ago it was taken over by a big events company and became very boring and over-commercialised, so now I just avoid it.
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Re: Do you actually have any Christmas spirit?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Dec 27, 2022 12:57 am

lingua wrote:I enjoyed Christmas as a child and younger adult but once I reached middle aged I lost interest. The parties are fun but otherwise I don't participate. So no ... I no longer have any Christmas spirit. These days my attitude is that it's for children.

Yes, this is roughly my view. I do know people, adults, who have a modest appreciation of it - mostly for the time off work - though there are some people who act like they have to do important things and spend quite a lot of time organising out of all proportion. I find these people quite tiresome... and tiring and likely very close to those Carmody described who seek perma-happiness.

I wouldn't want to take it away from children, because I remember how much I liked it when I was a child and I hope the same sense of it is still what they are experiencing now. About a week before the day I was at a house, just visiting, where there was a children's Christmas party and they seemed to be having a great deal of fun. However I know now that for me in the past it was an illusion of sorts. That it was really joy not because of 'Christmas', but because people were together interacting under relaxed circumstances and we got visited by people we never usually got to see. We lived in a rather isolated part of Cumbria so it was rather exciting to have visitors, sometimes from 'afar' and bearing gifts.

My chief complaint about all these holidays/festivals is that they have reached the point of really badly going through the motions. The worst now is Easter with chocolate eggs and whatnot in the shops barely two months after Christmas, like a planned conveyor belt of sales events. I must say though that this year the Christmas thing around the shops here was really subdued. I didn't see any shops with decorations and no music or anything. I used to play carols (and Wagner sometimes) with some brass players I know. I didn't even see them about this year. I had thought the last two years of restriction and social problems would have helped people to see the core social value of suspending work and just coming together, and maybe that has happened for some, but quite a lot seem determined to switch on as many fairy lights as possible and have a blow-out, otherwise they seem to feel they've been swindled.
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