Finding Christmas Traditions

The Christmas season has come and gone for another year. Once again I've spent days leading up to Christmas waiting for the spirit of the season to take hold of me. I read about Christmas traditions families have and hear all about couples having problems creating a Christmas experience that they both feels captures that feeling they had growing up with their families. Something about the season that is brings up sentimental feelings and memories of past Christmas joys. People have events they they look forward to each year: trimming the tree, exchanging gifts with family members, having a certain kind of food that is only made at Christmas, writing Santa your wish list(or the Christmas Pig if you were a Buell), opening gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, and making your loved ones feel the love that you have for them.
When I was younger, I was blissfully unaware of what was going on behind the scenes to make Christmas happen..
The more I found out what actually went into making Christmas happen in my family, the less I felt a connection to it. It didn't take long before my Christmas season completely lost whatever it had contained when I was a kid. I had written many Christmas lists at the request of my parents only for it to inevitably be ignored, if they even remembered to get me gifts, regardless of how easy I made it for them. The tradition of the Christmas day let down and apology. It was lucky if the tree was up and decorated before Christmas morning at 3 AM. A tradition of losing ornaments to the bleary eyes of sleep deprivation and poor planning. My siblings and I never really got gifts for each other, because by the time any of us had any extra money to spend we'd already scattered off to college or a new city so it never came up. A tradition of being broke-ass kids and harboring animosity towards one another.
There was always a tradition of having a meal with my extended family. I never liked it as a kid and the older I got the more it became clear that no one in my family enjoyed it. Every year I'd get dragged to the home of my aunt and uncle to eat a meal prepared by people without a sense of taste or possibly just an unrelenting passion for exceptionally bland food. I was given a new piggy bank every year for most of my youth with no clear explanation other than: "you've got a piggy banks so we got you a new one this year;" which translates to "We gave you a bunch of banks, so now you have a collection so we'll continue to assume you want a new one for every Christmas and birthday you have with us." Eventually someone from my extended family suggested a Yankee swap gift exchange, so gifts became even more generic and terrible. This was where my extended family re-gifted the unwanted gifts they got from office parties and friends. This gift exchange became a tradition that I was never invited to, or was told about but then after purchasing a gift for it find out they decided to have the gift exchange that morning while my family wasn't there instead. To top all of this off my family and my extended family have been butting heads over every family gathering for years. The extended family does what they can to exclude my family from anything they may be doing. Frequently not even letting my family know that they are in town until they've been there a few days. I could go on about inappropriate comments blamed on too much holiday drinking by kind-hearted spouses and hours of sitting on the couch waiting for a ride home. This was always accompanied by a hope that I wouldn't have to converse with any of my inebriated relatives.
Through all of this I saw nothing among the traditions of my family that I wanted to continue on without them. Trying to recreate any of them doesn't feel like it'd help me get that Christmas spirit back all of a sudden either.

This year I don't like that I feel that way. I want to have Christmas traditions that I can enjoy for years. I want to feel the season in my guts not have to double check a calendar to see when the actual day is going to be. I don't even know how one starts a tradition. Doing something once with the promise to do it again the following year seems like it has a high probability of not becoming a tradition for the following year.
This year I finally started working on a new tradition. This year being an unemployed Christmas, I had to set the bar low for new traditions. I came up with the holiday lights hunt. In the evening, going for a walk to find a certain # of houses with Christmas lights. Can only count houses you walk past, can't go down the same street until you've reached your #, can't count houses you pass everyday already. This is the start of a tradition. I think having some sort of warm alcoholic drink would improve the tradition (eggnog with bourbon, mulled wine, etc). I feel like this is a step towards creating that Christmas feeling I used to have when I was a kid. I'm not sure if it will work, but I'm tired of having a tradition-less holiday season.

Wordiness to the Rescue

I've thought before about how the degree I pursued in college didn't really prepare me for a lucrative career after graduation. It didn't do much of anything for me except cause me to collect a lot of books that I have to haul with me whenever I move and give me a habit of wordy explanations to up the word count of essays I had to write years ago. At least those were my thoughts about it when I was extra broke and feeling glum. Yet in that moment my essay wordiness saved the day.

How did it do that you may ask? Well at the end of any given college semester there will always be a few students who have more money than they should and less of a work ethic than they should. So at the end of every semester I plaster craigslist with an ad for inexpensive essay writing. It doesn't always work, but every now and then I'll find somebody who will decide they like my prices enough that they'll buy their way through the end of the semester. Thank greatness for their weak moral fiber.

This year I was lucky enough to find a few of those folks who let their parents fatten my wallet. I enjoy it more than I should really. It reminds me of the countless late nights of wide awake essay writing, or in at least one case 45 minutes before the final essay was due to be turned in without exception. I enjoy forming an essay and trying to push the page count over whatever the minimum count is for the assignment.

I like to try to research as much as I can with google on whoever it is that is actually asking me to write something for them. It helps me figure out how likely they are to try to screw me out of my payment and if they do how I can get my payment out of them, i.e. contacting their professor or school or even just writing a blog post with all our emails on them. I feel like I shouldn't talk about the specifics of the essay or the students that most recent hired me, since they paid me on time. They also didn't try to bargain with my completely reasonable prices either. Given the school they are attending I imagine it is more a case of my reasonable prices seem super cheap to them. It wasn't difficult to figure out what school they were attending, and wouldn't have been even if they hadn't inadvertently provided me with the name of the professor and the title of the course. I just like to feel comfortable with my leverage in the situation, so I won't have to worry about getting paid. 

Since I left college, I've gone through the whole range of regret and resolution over my choice of major. I have a habit of seeing the worst parts about my choices sometimes. It's nice to be reminded of the good parts about them sometimes. That extra little boost helps to get me through this rainy winter that has taken over Long Beach as of late.