Holidays are negotiable.

It just hit me that Simbang Gabi (Dawn Mass) starts today. Even if I don’t go to church and my spirituality is highly negotiable, I’m still a Christmas person. Even if it gets less exciting every single year, shutting work down for a week is priceless. From 24th December to 1st January, sloth and gluttony are legitimate. Hyper-materialism is considered ‘reward’ for a tiring year, and notoriously broken plans like “We should have dinner!” more or less materialise at this time.

Unfortunately, this Christmas, sloth is out of the picture. I have essays due next month, a dissertation to work on, and PhD proposals to put together. Gluttony is not too special, because it will not serve a celebratory function, but a lame diversion from stress. Also, it’s hard to be materialistic when you’re broke. Window shopping is torture. And obviously, (we should have) dinner plans will be shelved for sometime. It’s not really my thing to derive happiness from my close friends’ misery, but I take solace in the fact that other people are tied up with non-Christmassy obligations too.

I don’t want to concede that inability to take a break is part of adulthood. Because academic and professional schedules are not patterned after the Gregorian calendar, we just have to adjust the ‘holidays’ we can celebrate. For students, that would be summer, for accountants that would be … I don’t know, sometime after closing the books and for people in sales, that would be never. I hate to pull the ‘social construction’ card, but it makes sense, holidays are social constructions. We don’t have to be too disappointed just because we can’t celebrate with the rest of the non-worked up world.

So to my friends going to Dublin, Germany, Prague and Italy this Christmas: Enjoy, you unsympathetic slackers … and buy me something pretty ;p

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.