Why we love the stress of the holidays.
Written by Jake Ryan
Winter is miserable. It’s like nature’s second worst joke (its worst is spring).
Think about it, despite the fact that the sun is closer to the Earth, it’s colder on our chunk of the planet. It gets so cold, in fact, that some of the water in our atmosphere freezes as it falls back to the ground. We call this sleet. When said water crystallizes, it’s snow. All sleet is snow but not all snow is sleet. Once that frozen water hits the ground, creating patches of ice that cause your car to skid out or spin your top half where your bottom half usually is, you may start to grow tired of winter.
Despite the awful weather, winter has the magical ability to capture the hearts and minds of essentially everyone.
Why is that?
Well, magic of course.
Holiday magic that is. The final three months of each calendar year is filled to the brim with holidays. Not only that, but they just so happen to be the best holidays. There’s Halloween and Thanksgiving in the U.S., but to truly get to the best of the best, you have to wait until the very end of the year. Saving the best for last, we have Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza and the severely underrated New Year’s Eve. And we can’t forget International Ninja Day, which is on Dec. 5.
There’s the annual back and forth of when to put out decorations. We love to complain about our neighbors leaving their lights up three months after the holidays are over or walking into a store and seeing Santa in July. But nothing is worse than reaching the evening on Christmas and realizing that you have to wait an entire year to see that grandpa in the red suit everywhere you go and hear Michael Bublé on the radio (because when else do you hear him?).
We stress out, complain and wipe out on ice, but simultaneously cannot seem to get enough.
It must be that aforementioned holiday magic. An entire month of spending time with friends and family, getting presents, scenic winter wonderlands and music that sticks in your head like a piece of a gumdrop in your hair. That’s the magic. Sure, we hate seeing lights long after the holidays and hearing the music again and again. It makes us want to rip our gumdrop covered hair out.
But at the end of the day, it is all worth it because, after all, how often do we get to experience magic outside of fiction? Well, I suppose we do every year. Whether it’s December or the months before, those few days are enough to fill us all with a profound feeling of joy, love and whimsy.