Christmas Is Interesting

Last Updated on: 19th December 2022, 03:30 pm

I heard this depressing Christmas song the other day, not the one I referenced in the title though, and I wasn’t going to post it, but it won’t leave me.

lyrics are here.

So…Christmas is nearly here. How did that happen. I feel like it snuck up on me. Whenever I ask anyone else, they say it did the same to them. I wonder why? We’ve had other years where the weather hasn’t been Christmas-like and it didn’t seem as sneaky. We have our own special reasons, like the family having last Christmas in March and lots of stressful stuff going on, but that doesn’t explain everybody else. The malls didn’t seem so filled with what I call zombies, or people not looking where they’re going, madly searching for gifts and nearly plowing over everyone else in the process. Nobody seemed to know when the downtown Christmas market was coming, even though it’s at the same time every year. What has us all so distracted. Are we all dealing with Jerry Osiris?

By some miracle, we got our Christmas shopping done, no thanks to DHL Global who was handling shipping of some calendars we bought for people. Their idea of a job well done is “well, we delivered it somewhere. So it’s delivered!” It makes me think of the line from the song about Wernher Von Braun. “‘Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That’s not my department.’ says Wernher Von Braun”.

Somebody got some calendars. Maybe it was J.J. Nobody knows where they went, and nobody cares. DHL told me to go back to the merchant, like it was their fault. The merchant could only give me a refund or ship me a new one, priority post. Priority post is taking just as long as the other one took to get here. When I asked them to investigate where it went, all they said was “Are you sure it’s not in your mailbox?” When I said I was absolutely sure, all they said was “Well, they say it’s delivered. There’s nothing we can do.” Hell of a relationship you have there, customer service dude. At least UPS tried to investigate where the shipment went, and did bring it back. These guys just don’t care. This new calendar is supposed to arrive on December 23. Hopefully it arrives in the right place.

Christmas is weird for us this year. We each have to go to our own family Christmas stuff. My dad has been dealing with health issues, and is soon going to need a kind of major surgery. So, at the last minute, I decided to get my butt home. But because I wasn’t sure if there would even be a Christmas at the usual time because of the health stuff, I hadn’t tried to reserve spots on trains. This meant I had to get creative and try to hitch rides with family for part of the trip. On the way home, I just managed to get one of the last Economy Plus seats on the train. It was very close to sold out. So to make it easier to find room in people’s cars for the parts where I couldn’t get a seat on the train, I’m going to my family and Steve’s going to his. I’m going to miss him and his whole family, but it feels like the right thing to do.

A small note about catching transportation: Go Transit can go…fly a kite. If I wanted to catch the Go bus from Kitchener to Mississauga, I would have to stand at a random bus stop and flag the bus down. Flag it down? Why won’t it stop when people are at the stop? Because buses from multiple bus lines come there, so they don’t know what bus you’re waiting for. Seriously, dude. How long would it take to stop, ask, then move along? City buses have to stop and ask all the time when multiple city buses come to the same stop.

Their “solution”, and I wish I could place that word in the biggest air quotes I can draw, is to have me call a day in advance and tell them exactly what bus I’ll be getting on, and then they’ll make sure to pass that information on to the driver. They’ll make sure…like the bus driver will make sure to remember my stop. No, I don’t think I’m trusting my trip home to my family on Christmas Eve to that system. Aside from that, I always thought the benefit of Go Transit was flexibility. All of that flexibility is gone for me because a driver can’t be arsed to stop and ask if anyone is looking for the Go bus, and a company can’t be arsed to pull a bus into a terminal. So I’ll be taking a $100 Uber instead of a $14 Go bus because I’d like to get where I’m going. Thankfully, I don’t have a guide dog right now, so Uber shouldn’t ruin my trip.

Gees! Sorry for all the griping and whining. Maybe this depressing Christmas song got right into my bones! But after presents and people get where we’re going, we’ll all have a good time, I’m sure. Well, maybe my oldest nephew will be disappointed because I didn’t manage to bring Uncle Steve. I’m not as good at chasing him around the house, and by the end of Thanksgiving, he said “Next time, try and bring…um…oh what’s his name?” “Uncle Steve?” I asked, and he was very excited. Yeah! Uncle Steve!” Sorry, kid, Uncle Steve will be spending Christmas with Seppa!

I got asked a question that was harder to answer than I expected. A guy from Walmart was helping me around the store and said “This is my first year in Canada. What do people do at Christmas parties?” As I tried to answer him, I realized how diverse our Christmas parties can be. I wish I had been thinking more on my feet and just suggested that he ask the host of the party if people are all bringing food or gifts or whatever. But I went on this meandering journey of “Some people sing songs, some people exchange gifts, some people bring food, some people drink, some of them too much, but it’s mostly about just getting together and having fun.”

I hope everyone else managed to not be completely blindsided by Christmas, and manages to have a good time when it gets here. And I hope next year can please be kind to us. We’re all bruised and tender from these last couple of years. We’re healing, but the scab is not ready to be ripped off. Please don’t rip it off!