Very Grinchy

I've spent the last few months (or, more realistically, the last year) trying to figure out how I can avoid the holidays. Where can I go to opt out? I really just want nothing to do with them this year. Maybe never again, but I don't know that part yet.

I hate that it feels obligatory. I hate feeling like I have to participate. I hate that it's in our face in our culture, as just a given, it's what people DO, celebrate the holidays. Why can't November and December be just regular, normal months like all the rest? Why does there have to be all the fuss and hoopla, the expectation and big deal made?

I have zero desire this year to go shopping for gifts. Going to the mall. Trying to pick gifts for people I rarely even see, who already have everything they could possibly need or desire. It was a little easier when the nieces were children, but now that they are teens... and, like I said, they have everything they could ever need or want anyway.

And I don't really want to receive any gifts, either. There isn't anything I need, and nothing even that I really want right now. Not material things, anyway. A family, a home, those things that don't come in a box wrapped up under a tree. But I certainly don't need more trinkets or doodads to further clutter my already overfull and overcluttered little living space.

And then there's the whole other part, the going. The gifting and the going. It's been this way since I left home at seventeen. For twenty-five years, I have had to show up in someone else's life in order to celebrate. I have to go -- to someone else's home, into someone else's world -- in order to have anyone to celebrate with. And I am so beyond burned out on that.

The holidays as a single person suck, and I'm so weary of it. I just don't want to do it anymore. Let all the little families everywhere do their Norman Rockwell scenes and leave me alone; don't force me to participate.

Seriously -- where do I go to opt out?