How Facebook is Ruining Christmas

Facebook is ruining the Holidays.

I have two reasons to back up my seemingly outrageous claim, and then an example of a pretty standard experience that we all

Isn't this a wonderful tree? It's better than yours, anyway.

endured this year, thanks to social media.

1.  Artificial Intimacy:

20 years ago the family and distant friends got together for only a few reasons:  A death, a marriage, or Christmas.  That was it.

Sometimes by late December we had not seen relatives, friends, or other important people for months, and so we were extra eager to get-together with them during the Holidays to catch up, visit, or what have you.

Christmas was really about your family getting together and sharing the experience.  It was special.

Now we have a way to exchange thoughts, gossip, secrets, and pictures instantly with all of our family and friends through a social media website, and so the personal aspect of getting in the same place at the same time is lost, or at least not nearly as important as it used to be.

All over Facebook right now there are status’ that scream “Merry Christmas Everybody!!!@!!!” and the like.  While this is nice, it’s not a genuine greeting, nor is it at all intimate, but we still count it as having connected with people, at least on some level.

Why waste time driving around to peoples’ houses when we can just send  a broadcast Holiday cheer meant for anyone and everyone on our friends list?

This is not the meaning of Christmas.

2. Keeping up with the Jones‘:

The pissing contest known as Christmas was hard enough when people would only visit a few different families a year, but now its too slippery a slope to traverse and maintain your sanity.

With the popularity of the internet and the ease of file-sharing, all of a sudden there are a whole lot of Jones’ out there that we still (for some sick reason) try to keep up with.

Friends on Facebook upload pictures of their “world’s greatest family gathering!!#!!@!!”, or their expensive tree, or their over-the-top decorating skills.  They’re  just showing off, and you want nothing more than to upload something waaaay cooler than their crap.

Sure, it’s not the same idea of competition as it used to be, but do not tell me that anyone can look at other people’s christmas photos on Facebook without comparing everything they see to what they have experienced themselves, at least a little bit (the ones that deny it the most are usually the most guilty of the infraction).  It’s human nature.  They don’t make up phrases like “keeping up with the Jones'” for nothing.

No matter what, there will be a cooler, more expensive, or more stylish something on Facebook, somewhere.

The Fallout of the Above Two Reasons:

Most of us already know waaay too much about our siblings, friends, and family because of their incessant Status Updates.

Also, you feel like dog crap and are preemptively feeling defensive because our Christmas has paled in comparison to all the fake, awesome ones you have seen on Facebook.

And so, feeling depressed and uncomfortably informed about your family already, long family gatherings are an excellent place to spend the Holidays.

The New Age Family Gathering

Ever since Facebook started, family gatherings go like this:

4pm – Arrive, hug, try to talk about your lives, but realize that you both know effing everything about each other.

4:15pm –  Comment on the tree that you have seen so many pictures of on Facebook (while secretly wondering how much it would take to tip it over and be able to blame their ugly dog).

4:16pm – Awkward silence (this has become the new, most popular Christmas music of Facebook-era Christmas gatherings).

5pm – Eat, drink, drink, drink (red wine, white wine, Grandpa’s malt liquor, whatever you can find).

5:35pm – Try to tell a joke, but get called out by two know-it-all siblings that saw that same joke on Facebook.

5:45pm – Get drunk and start taking pictures with your phone and immediately posting them all on Facebook so that other people still think you are having the time of your life.

6:30pm – Get drunker, try to talk to your family again but get frustrated because you already know everything about them and their lives.

6:32pm -More awkward silence (thank God that there are small children present, because staring absently at the little buggers is an easy way to eat up an hour).

7:30pm – Try to break the silence by playing a friendly board game.

7:39pm – Game board pieces get used as weapons to settle a rules dispute between sisters.

7:45pm – Learn to appreciate the peaceful (awkward) silence (Gawd, those are cute kids!).

8:25pm – Become bored, hostile seven-year-olds because you still have 2 hours of time to kill before you can escape (remember when you fell off your bike and broke your testicle? Yeah, well, remember when you were a skank all through High School?).

8:29pm – Pour yourself a double whiskey just to numb the rage (tip that God-awful tree over and blame the dog, only to find out the dog is tied up in the backyard.  Blame your toddler son, instead).

8:30pm – Quietly creep on all your Facebook friends while hiding in an upstairs bedroom until it’s time to leave.

10pm – Tell the host you had the time of your life and promise to do it again next year.

10:01pm – Awkward silence (force your child to hug and kiss everyone in the house so that you don’t have to).

10:25pm – Leave, for the love of God!

10:35pm – Your wife asks you why you can’t afford a beautiful tree like the one at the party.

10:36pm – Angry silence.

11pm – Post this exact status update:  “Just got home from the best gathering ever.  Had soooo much fun, can’t wait until next year!!!!!  Love you guys!!”

Facebook has given the world a lot of positives, and they outweigh the negatives, but Facebook has ruined Christmas.

Failed Santa Picture, Again.

Well, it happened.

Merry effing Christmas everyone!

It happened regardless of our dreams, hopes, and planning.

The Annual Santa Picture was a bust.

We tried our best.  We fed them their favourite crap just previous to the planned visit, we rehearsed the questions that the old bugger in the red suit would ask, and we talked about what would happen to our two boys when it all went down.  But it failed.

Here are the reasons that we failed (and I know that this failure falls on the parents, and not on the poor kids of which so much was asked).

The Waiting – We did not think about the wait time that would inevitably hamper us.  We had to stand in a crowded mall for almost 40 minutes before it was our turn.  Our children lasted happily for quite a long time, playing in and around the water fountain nearby, but it was just too long for a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old to wait.  They got irritated, and then we got irritated.  Well, I did.  My wife is better than I and so she remained steadfast and patient.

The Build-up – In hindsight we probably built up too much pressure and anticipation with all of our rehearsing and talking about the upcoming moment.  If we had just left it alone and let it happen we might have avoided all the hullabaloo and stress of the actual meeting.  We thought we were preparing the boys to deal with the attention and stress that would come about from a strange old man dressed in red with dozens of other strange people crowded around watching.  Looking back, that’s a lot of pressure for their little brains to digest.

The Desperation – Kids can sense their parents’ mood, and they know when we are getting anxious and desperate.  Once you start getting worked up about something, your child picks up on it and begins to panic.  So, when our turn finally came and I asked our big boy if he wanted to go meet Santa and sit on his lap, he could smell my trepidation.  This is the critical moment that will decide success or failure, and parents’ are scared that we will ruin the moment and frighten our babies off.   He knows, for some reason that he does not need to understand, that you are scared about something, and he gets scared too.  I tried to be cool and calm, but I must have betrayed my feelings, because I saw him falter and watch me closely.

I cracked under the pressure.

I pleaded with him, and told him how nice Santa was. He wasn’t buying what I was selling.

I tried to buy him off.  I actually offered my two-year-old son a handful of change if he could just please go and talk to the senior citizen with the beard.  I watched him weighing the options, and then he again rejected me.  It was over.

I tried coercion.  Knowing fully well that I had already lost this fight but being too stubborn to quit, I tried to gently command my son to sit on Santa’s lap.  Of course this didn’t work, and only ended up putting my boy into the deep end of his emotional wading pool.  He completely froze and shut down, refusing to even leave the line-up in order to get past the evil Santa and away from the embarrassing situation.

Having lost the battle with the Older, we turned to the Younger who had been watching the whole episode and stealing furtive glances at Santa.  I knew this was doomed, but I picked him up whilst my wife prepared to try to snap a picture before the screaming could commence. The screaming was the quicker this day, and we ended up with the photo above.  Doesn’t it just scream Merry Christmas?  Santa is so unimpressed the he cannot even fake a smile.

We failed. Utterly, miserably, predictably.

Oh well, I guess we can always try again next year.

New Strategy/Format to my Blog…

Some advice I received from a respected source today was to pace myself, and really concentrate on quality over quantity.  One big, beautiful blog per week is more than enough to keep both an audience happy and my mind content.  Also, if I was so inclined, a short Thought of the Day or perhaps a small story on a daily or bi-daily basis would be a nice, convenient way to stay in touch between posts.

With a whole pile of things going on in my real life, blogging will have to slow down, and so I am doing a controlled slow down so that I do not burn out and lose the blog altogether

I do not know why I got so damned hung up on the whole daily post idea anyway and really, I knew it wasn’t realistic.  Between my full-time job, my farm, my kids, and my wife’s full-time job (not necessarily in that order of priority, trust me), things are already getting a little hairy, and now I want to sit on my ass and write for 2+ hours a day?  My wife put it best one night at about 3:30am, when she woke up for a pee and a drink of water to find me clicking away at a post.  I will not quote her here, for two reasons:

1)  I told her when I started writing this thing that I would keep her out of it as much as possible, and (more importantly)

2) Her blunt, uncensored, spirited words are only fit for a man who thought it was a good idea to marry a strong, honest Ukrainian woman and then write stupid blogs all effing night even though I had a big day of work scheduled.  Enough said.

And so I will slow down, relax, and trust my advisor that this will be a better experience for you and I both.  To be honest, I was already struggling with the idea of sitting down every night and crushing out a new article.  This format will allow me to properly digest my thoughts so that I can convey my messages, points, and arguments in a coherent, well-constructed and easily readable manner.

I have not worked out all the kinks in this new plan, but I’m sure we can both figure it out as we go along. I might write once a week, I might write twice;  we’ll have to see how things go.

And let me know if there are any topics that you want my take on.  As you have seen in all of my previous posts, I will tell you what I think, for better or worse.

Musings of a Tired Mind

I’m tired.  I’m blah.  I have nothing to say. The only reason I am writing this is because I want to keep writing and I know that if I do not write now then I will not have time tomorrow and that is how blossoming writers lose the habit and doom themselves to failure.  And so I will write.

Here's your homework: go through all your old photos and try to find a picture of your dad holding you as you slide down the slide. You aren't going to find it, because it never happened. If we wanted to slide, and got hurt, than that was fine by them. "Don't go down head first, ya stupid bastard." (That might actually be a direct quote)

I have about 1800 reads so far, and so thanks for that, everyone.  I am not sure who is reading this, and I cannot even comprehend that over 1000 people will have read this crap, but I do know that I owe it all to those people who are sharing my stuff, and so thank you.  You know who you are.

Today was hard.  Not even funny-to-write-about hard.  Just tiring, repetitive, work.  I think the younger boy ate a bit of Play Doh, in fact I know he did, but the label says non-toxic so at worst his craps will be day-glow orange tomorrow.  And if his craps are day-glow orange tomorrow, then things are looking up already because that will be a delightful surprise.

I’m jesting (no I’m not, I can’t wait!).

My dog had puppies a week ago, and all 11 are still strong and hungry.  That poor effing dog, you want crappy parenting you should watch that bitch do her job.  Not only does she feed, clean, and care for 11 helpless, immobile babies at once, but she eats their shit.  You want motherly love, that’s it.  Of course there are a thousand inborn reasons why that dog will eat the fecal matter of her young, but that doesn’t make it more tasty.

We feed that poor mother everything she’ll eat.  She eats as much raw meat as she wants, unlimited dry dog food, and any table scraps that she thinks taste as good as, or at least not worse than, her own puppies’ shit.  Needless to say she’s not picky.  I doubt that we can keep up on a day-to-day basis with the caloric needs that 11 puppies will drain from the teats of a nursing dog, but gad dang it, we’re gonna try our best.  We have formula and feeding syringes at the ready for if/when we think that either a puppy is not competing well, or the mother cannot keep up with all those suckers.

I doubt we will need the artificial feeding supplies, as this is how nature works and we should trust nature.  This is not the first batch of puppies that have been splashed onto the ground.  There is a trusted system developed over a long period of time that guarantees success, at least most of the time.  Dogs come fully equipped to give birth to, care for, and raise these puppies, and then do it again very soon.

The same is true of us people.  We are given the tools (sometimes they may be well hidden behind fear) and knowledge to get out there and raise our own puppies.   We just have to remember as a society to lean back, relax, and let some things happen.  We are so over protective and uptight about our babies that we tend to drain a lot of the joy away.  We kill ourselves with stress, and then wonder why we are losing our minds.

There’s a reason that the previous generation, our parents, seemed so much better at this then we feel, and that’s because they didn’t stress themselves out about everything.  We, as kids, used to play in the woods for days at a time, sometimes showing up after dark to fill our gullets and catch a few Z’s before heading out again.  Do you think our generation will allow that shit to happen?  Hell no.  Not unless we put webcams in the woods and were able to watch them building their stupid fort live.  What if something happened?  We’d need to be there to help them.

Shit.

I crashed two tractors by the time I was like 6, wrecking a tree and a grain bin.  And each time I got an ass-whooping.  What can I say, I drove more carefully as a 7 year-old.  Some will say it’s lucky that I wasn’t killed in those accidents.  Sure, of course it is, but I say I’m lucky I got to live as a kid in the last wave of people who were allowed to be kids.  We learned independence because we had to make our own decisions as our parents weren’t looking over our gad danged shoulders 24/7.  And we learned to make good decisions because otherwise we got our ass kicked by those parents when they finally found out about our bad choice(s).

Today the onus is put on us parents to not allow the kid to make a poor choice by only offering good choices, and so any failure by the kid was a failure by his parents, no questions asked.  Shit.

Mark my words, the current generation of babies and toddlers will NEVER leave their parents’ home.  Ever.  And it will be so wide-spread that no one will even notice, let alone question it.  It will happen because our kids will not be equipped to make their own decisions, and they will lack the necessary experience to gain their own independence.  It will be a thing of horror when we hear about the Wilson’s 39-year-old son moving out.  We will speak quietly about those negligent parents that refused to give their precious child everything he needed to be happy, regardless of the cost (financial or otherwise) and so the boy was forced to move out in order to be happy.  For shame.

Our parents generation, growing up, moved out of the house as soon as their folks weren’t looking and the front door was left ajar.  Ask them.  And then our generation moved out only when the we had a good damned reason.  We were not in nearly the rush that our parents were in 30 years ago.

We, as a North American society, have been trending down this slippery slope for a few decades now, and its seems that we will be the ones that finally push ourselves over the edge and over-parent our kids to the point of complete dependence.

I hope I’m wrong, but that never happens.

Sick Babies are my Nightmare!

Once one evolves into a parent, sick babies become one of the worst feelings on Earth.  For the sake of this article, I will be talking about common illnesses such as colds and flu’s.  I will not touch upon chronic health issues, like asthma or even worse conditions, because I haven’t (Thank you Jebus) had to experience those things (luckily for me) and so do not feel comfortable talking about them. I can only imagine that the experience that I deem as the ‘worst’ would pale in comparison to waking up to a sick child every damned day.

The sick child experience is sometimes made even worse because we can see it coming for a few days.  For example, a cousin comes to play, and then we later find out that the visitor

We like to start with a target that is hard to miss, to, you know, boost his confidence.

spent the night previous (or even the next one) awake and vomiting.  Great. When this happens parents spend the next few days of peace dreading and praying that the illness somehow miraculously bypasses your susceptible little piggies and moves onto other targets.  This is never the case.  And now imagine having two babies, so that parents will, again, pray without hope that the first afflicted will not infect the other.  Again, never the effing case.

At first, the child will be grumpy all day, and the fatigue and frustration of battle will sometimes hide this first clue that your baby is coming down with something.  He will refuse to eat, and we just think that he’s being a dork, and not eating because he’s grumpy.  He will then roll around during his nap, hardly sleeping, and usually at this point even the thickest parent will be able to piece together the puzzle.  You’re child is sick.  The house is about to be a shitty (no pun intended) place to live for a few days.  My wife, being a medical professional, is usually so damn aware of the health of our babies that she knows the babies have the flu even before the child’s own tummy wummy does.

She’ll phone me from work and be like: “The baby is getting sick.  Take his temperature, if it’s high give him Tylenol, and stop feeding him junk.   Oh, and be nice to him and comfort him.” (How the bloody hell does she know these things?)

This blows me away because I have been at home with this mini man all day, and he seems fine to me, (sure a little finicky, but nothing too out of the ordinary) but somehow from work, twenty miles away, the mother can sense the sickness rolling in like black clouds over our house.  In the beginning of my parenting career, I would argue that the child in question is fine, great even and there’s no cause for alarm.  I have since learned the hard way that somehow my wife can just sense this shit.  It must have something to do with those instincts that the girls hone but the boys remain immune to.  And so now I just try my best to prepare for the storm, battening down the proverbial hatches and all that.  But nothing can prepare you for the onslaught of bad stuff that’s about to explode.

The first projectile vomit will blast out when my head is turned, and I am somehow already behind the eight ball.

Here is a summary of what happens for the next while (it might be hours or even days):  Crying, puking, fever, crying, diarrhea, puking, crying, fever, Tylenol, useless nap, more shitting and, finally, crying and vomiting.  It’s horrible for a lot of reasons.  It’s gross, stinky, dirty, and tiring.  You run around all day wiping up puke, changing diapers, cuddling sick kids, and the whole effing time you know, you just know, that whatever is ailing these poor kids is gonna kick your ass in a day or two, but you don’t really give two shits about yourself when babies are sick anyway.

Those reasons are bad enough, but are nothing compared to the biggest reason why I hate sick babies:  I can do so little to make my child feel better.  Nothing has made me feel worse or more useless than caring for a sick child.  The experience is a killer because, obviously, I want nothing more than to end the yucky sickness and there’s nothing I can do to achieve that.  I hate that feeling.  All I can do is care for the child and wait for the ailment to pass, but as a man, I am not a carer so much as a fixer.  I see my sick baby and have neither the patience nor willpower to simply care for the squirt and wait it out.  So I drive myself insane fretting about something I cannot fix.

I say put it on me.  I’m not sure who I have to talk to about this, but please, give me all the shit to spare my kids.  There has not been a disease, sickness, or pain that I would not happily take onto myself if only to spare my child.  I don’t give a shit what it is: cold, flu, broken arm, cancer, the Plague.  You name it, I’ll gobble it up with a smile so long as my child need not go through it.  Bar none.

But that’s just part of being a parent, right?