Christmas Time

It was a white Christmas this year in Sweden. I spent it here for the first time in a few years; last year I was in the south of Kerala, India, and the year before in the south of Puglia, Italy. So this year I am here. In the south of Skåne, in the south of Sweden, in the north of Europe, in the north of this planet, in the dark and cold spheres of existence.
Christmas is big here, as in all other western societies. Big on big money-spending, consuming, stuffing ourselves with chocolate and different traditional dishes, spending time with our familes and friends, giving each other gifts and watching cozy TV-shows and movies together.

But I just don't get it, personally. I am asking myself what is wrong with me. Am I a bit strange? Why don't I FEEL it?

It all seems like such a fake, false, time-consuming and most of all money-wasting time to me. I saw people running around like crazy in search for the perfect gift. I hear people dissappointed with the gifts they got. I hear people saying they feel sick after all the food they ate. I see chocolate wrappers and boxes being handed here and there and lying around everyhwere. Mothers and grandmothers wearing themselves out for cooking the perfect meal.

It is obviously a time to be together, to celebrate, to give each other gifts and appreciation... But what about the rest of the year? Why is it that we should give just on that specific day? And visit our old grandmother just during Christmas? It seems so... sheep-like. Like we cannot do these things spontaneously. Like we are heartless robots just following an outside structure, created by a materially driven society.

For me, it has felt like being inside a glass-bubble, watching the rest of my fellow people running around like they were headless chickens. The Christmas days made me feel sad, lonely, isolated. Like I was in a parallell reality. My own little world where I don't feel part of this Christmas-joy that I imagine people experience. I just don't feel it.

But if I spend Christmas in another culture, I always enjoy observing it- like the time when I was on a small Filipino island and went to an outdoors mega-midnight-mass and hung out on the grass for hours with the praying people, just watching them and their tradition. I feel more part of something that I am not "supposed" to be part of according to my genetical and geographical conditioning.

Maybe I am just made for being an outside observer of life, a wanderer, who walks from place to place. As long as I feel at home inside myself, I guess I'll be fine.