Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve and its almost all quiet. I can still hear traffic on the NKVE from my apartment buzzing by. Maybe some people going home after some late night Christmas Eve party.

I just got back from a Christmas Party too. There was turkey and some normal fare like Hokkien Mee. I ate more of the Hokkien Mee and fried rice instead of the Turkey and leg of lamb. I never really liked turkey. I think the first time I had turkey for Christmas was when Paul and Sue West invited me over to their house with a few other international students for a Christmas dinner. It was so kind of them to do that. We all sat around their dinning table and we had a wonderful dinner with turkey. I have to say I never got used to the smell of the meat.

Thinking back, I never really liked Christmas, I always found it too pretentious and commercialized. I'm not a Christian so I don't see it as a religious holiday for me. I had a really bad Christmas experience once and from then on I hated Christmas for a long time every time I think back about it. It was my first time in the US as a student (I arrived in winter). It was Christmas break and it was really cold and the campus was empty. I didn't have any food so I took a long cold walk to the supermarket nearby to buy some TV dinner. When I got to the store after trudging along in the bone cold winter, I found a sign on the door that said they were closed for Christmas.

I stood there staring at the sign and it hit me how lonely I was at that point. No food; it was cold; and I had no one around. I guess that kind of screwed up my perception of Christmas.

The next few winters after that, I avoided Christmas. The only good memory I had was that one Christmas dinner I had with Paul and Sue. I remember their kindness in sharing.

So today, I don't hate Christmas that much anymore. I still think its over commercialized, too many retailers putting too much pressure on the shoppers to buy things. Sometimes we end up with things we don't need.

Merry Christmas everyone