Annual "Blue Hates The Holidays" post

As any of you who has been reading my blog for a bit knows, I bloody HATE the holiday season.

srsly.

Everyone I know who loves the holidays only seems to do so before they've begun or after they're over.  Between the week before Thanksgiving to a few days after New Years, they're stressed, harrassed, rushed, crabby, and irritable.

The 'joyous' season invokes anxiety, guilt, sadness, even dislike.  People dread going to their inlaws; work themselves into a frenzy over cooking food; drive like insane creatures; snarl, shove, and panic in stores ... and so on and so on.

It's just stupid. And, frankly, I find it a teensy bit sad those folks who ONLY see their relatives on obligatory holidays.

I opted out years ago.  I'm not of the faith, so I don't celebrate the Christian Consumer Holiday, and I don't need a special day to be thankful for what I have (or cook yummy foodz!) so I don't do Thanksgiving.

I am forced, however, by my inlaws, to attend their celebrations because they refuse a daughter-in-law who doesn't acknowledge that standing around in an overdecorated, overheated series of rooms (television blaring in EACH one!), with a group of drunken people to whom you are not related and whom you dislike intensly, whilst what would be a perfectly wholesome and healthy meal - turkey - is deep fried in gallons and gallons of peanut oil in the driveway (and in the neighbour's drive, and the neighbour next to him, and so on, from McMansion to McMansion) is de rigueur!*

*sigh*

This year will be particularly painful as I have lost 142lbs since mid March 2007 (20 months) and many of these people who are not related to me have not seen/noticed me in that time.

So I'll get to field the diet questions.

Now, here's the thing.  I have NO problem chatting with anyone who is really interested in how I lost weight.  I enjoy it and love the chance to perhaps help someone lose some weight, too.  But there's two categories of questioners whom I dispise: the Magic Pill group who BEG me for diet tips then their eyes glaze over when they find out they can't eat all the cake, candy, doughnuts, butter, and fried chicken they want; and the Fashionably Thin group.

ALL of the people at my in-law's get togethers fall into the second crowd.

See, these people are well-to-do; fashion and style concious.  They live in ostentatiously huge houses in neighbourhoods where a group of tight-arsed control freaks tell them what sort of post box they can have.  They've never owned a car that wasn't white, black, silver, or chanpagne colour (except the older men who compensate for their squishy willies with shiny new wives their daughters' age and v. expensive red sportscars).

These women have never been overweight by more than 10lbs outside of pregnancy.  Most of them probably still fit in their cheerleader outfits and definately in their wedding gowns.

So ... why do they quiz me about my diet?  Good question.  They are not being polite.  They want something.  Entertainment?  My theory is that it makes some women (yes, I just shifted entirely to women. Men couldn't give a rat's backside about my weight unless I'm shaggable, which I'm not.) feel superior.

They want to hear about how hard it was to lose the weight so that they can pat themselves on the back that they - through better breeding and situation, one assumes - never had to suffer through that.

It's these same sorts who, when they ask about Bodog having a heart attack, never ask about his current health (except as a final aside).  They ask how we are coping and how difficult it must be and how financially badly off we are.  They want details of how I've had to summon every ounce of my talent for thrift just to pay the bills.

Again, my theory is that they then get to go home and archly congratulate themselves that they would never be reduced to washing and re-using zip-lok bags *GASP!*

ROTFL.  Let's hope, for their sake, that there is never a societal collapse.

I mean, OMG, where would they get their peanut oil?!

*My longest most rambly blog sentence evar?!

PS: for more on the Holidays and another rant, visit the Thrifty Dieter's Blog!