like all the fuckin ads with the hugging families around winter. any educationally normal adult knows everyone just gets more stressed, with travel and gifts and social obligations and everything, but you’re not even allowed to…openly feel that, it seems? it’s like there’s this happiness benchmark you have to reach, otherwise you’ll feel even shittier and sadder for not having a happy holiday season
A part of me finds it strange when it comes to the holidays how we are in many ways time warping back to idealized 40s or 50s Christmas every year with the decorations, music, and themes. It’s nice in ways to enjoy that nostalgia but for many of us that idea was just that an idea of what things were going to be like.
For many it was a grittier experience. Just think about those that dare to mention politics let alone some old family trauma. I get why some are like nah let’s stay home. In a lot of ways that how it really was when things were “great” back then with the alcoholism and deadbeat family members.
In the end it’s a testament to what a great job Coke did with those Christmas ads years ago now.
It’s out of hand, the extent to which the 40s and 50s have been romanticized. People back then had all the same problems as everyone has had since then.
And to think of the problems from the war dear old dad or mom was dealing with.
I watched a Yogi Berra documentary the other day. This fellow was pretty happy go lucky. It touched on his time during the war in the navy and his role of fishing out swollen dead bodies from after the D-day landings.
My first thought was my western 80s equivalent or today’s avocado toast generations have no idea about those horrors first hand and they needed to carry on their lives without the mental health support many today are afforded. They were probably affected in cases but their WW1 family members too.
Can you imagine if we were to take off the rose colored glasses what we would really see with adult eyes looking back?
All these people dealing with such massive losses of loved ones and family members etc. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, etc. Then between those 2 wars the Depression.
In that sense I can see why it was so important to be thankful for what’s left and what you have.
I just hope we all don’t need to revisit the reasons why those times were good in that sense.