Bah, humbug.

I can’t seem to go outside my apartment without hearing tons of Christmas music and seeing tons of the city’s retail outlets dressed in festive lights and garland. It’s the seventeenth of November. Now, I don’t want to be the Scrooge here – I’m (usually) all for Christmas – but this “Christmasism” (as I called it last year) is awfully premature. All this yuletide cheer printed on my Starbucks cups and playing over every loudspeaker is passing right through me. It’s Christmas? Really? I’m not feeling it.

“It only happens once a year,” my hot chocolate proudly displays in a serif on its insulating sleeve. My Treo and TI-89 disagree with the way people are trying to celebrate Christmas: starting now, Advent is now unofficially sixteen days longer, not including my official Roman Catholic Christmas season. That means Christmas is actually one-and-two-thirds times a year, since this marketed “Christmas” makes it last two-thirds as long as it officially does. (Okay, call me a math nerd, but I’ll blame my statistics homework.)

It’s just odd to me. Something’s missing that’s keeping me from feeling like it’s Christmas, and I’m thinking that it might just be that it’s still nowhere close to Christmas.

After all, it’s most definitely not school that’s indicative of something other than Christmastime. School gives every indication that those twelve days are just around the corner; last year at this time I was churning out C++ code and studying for exams. Now, I’m churning out XHTML/CSS and studying for exams. From a designer’s perspective, it’s still Christmas. Today a client came to me wanting me to rebrand most all of their printed marketing materials with Christmas designs. I’ve got tons of Christmas-related vector art to do.

It’s not school. It’s not work. What’s the problem then, really? I could put up my pathetic tree. I could wear my Santa cap to class. I could fill my fountain pens with Waterman Cardinal Red like I do every year. I’m playing nothing but Christmas music in iTunes as I write this. Sure, I guess I’m missing that whole Christmas love part of the season, but I’m definitely not lonely, so that can’t be it, either. Regardless of what I do or could do, I just don’t have any Christmas spirit.

This whole scenario sounds like the beginning of an awful Disney movie: what could possibly be causing me to have no want or care for this projected holiday cheer? I haven’t really any decent idea, but my bet’s on the utter superficiality of all of this Christmasism. When I was in the mall the other day, I posted a rather lengthy entry from my Treo to Flickr, stating that “I’m left wondering why corporations pay so much attention to a holiday that it seems that very few people I know celebrate.” In all honesty, I don’t know a soul that even thinks of Christmas as anything special or remotely religious; it’s a secular thing now. Christmas has been shelled down to Xmas, a frenzy of consumer expenditure without all of the love that should be inherent in the holiday. Do people even really love anymore? Everyone seems too apathetic. Once again, I’m slowly watching a holiday that I longed for as a child get less and less holiday-like and become nothing but an excuse for advertisers to follow a common theme for their designs, only this time I’m not left mad: I’m just disappointed and numb.

I’m not on the defensive this time. I’m slowly growing apathetic as well, and I don’t know what I can do about it. Maybe I need an egg nog. Maybe I need an elf to slap some sense into me. Either way, Christmas is beginning to lose everything that I found special about it, and it’s left looking like an awfully superficial shell of what it once was.

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