I'll Bah Your HumBug! Cheer the hell up!

I'm 25 and I still love Christmas. Is there anyone else from my generation that can say the same? It seems everyone I meet is too cynical to enjoy the holidays. Am I the only twenty-something still excited about the prospect of putting up a Christmas tree? Or who secretly loves that radio stations start playing Christmas carols the day after Thanksgiving ?

I'm not even religious, but I still find something magical and wonderful about this time of year. But lately, I feel the only people I can share these sentiments with are my parents and grandparents. It seems that very few, if any, of my friends share my enthusiasm about the holiday season.

I'm going back to NY for a couple of weeks at Christmas, and even though I won't be in San Diego for Christmas day, I still wanted to put up a tree. We have an artificial one that we bought last year, so I decided we should put it up so we could enjoy it for the few weeks we're here before going to visit the families.

Our ornaments and decorations from last year appear to have been lost when we moved a couple of months ago. I went out and got some new ornaments and have been excited about decorating the tree for a few days now. So tonight I put all the lights on before Omeed even got home from work. I figured I'd spare him the hassle of that part and we could just do the fun and easy part of putting the ornaments up.

After dinner I was restless and wanted to start decorating. I opened up the ornaments and Omeed started putting them on the tree really quickly. Watching him, it seemed, to me, like this was some chore that he needed to get out of the way so he could get back to something more exciting (like reading reddit and digg).

After he put up his last ornament, he immediately sat down and opened up his laptop. This upset me. I hadn't even turned on the lights on the tree yet. (Usually I turn all the lights in the house off, and then turn the tree on and just sit and enjoy the beauty of it for a couple of minutes.)

So I've been upset all evening about this. I feel like even if this wasn't something he was enthusiastic about, he could at least embrace it a little bit, knowing how much it means to me. But after thinking about this awhile, I don't even know how upset with him I can realistically be. His family didn't set aside a whole day for finding, cutting down, and putting up a tree up like mine did. Christmas isn't as big a deal at his house, and it certainly doesn't thrill him the way it does me.

As I started to wonder at his lack of passion for the season, I started to realize that his behavior seems to be the norm among our age group. A friend of ours will be house/dog sitting for us while we're away for the holiday, and he rolled his eyes when he found out I was putting up a tree. Another friend has decided no one she knows is receiving anything from her this year. A good friend and her new boyfriend have agreed not to exchange gifts on their first Christmas as a couple.

It seems to me that my joy and enthusiasm for the holidays is much less common than the behavior I witnessed from my boyfriend tonight. And while that may be true, I have decided not to excuse the behavior. There may be a general shift away from Christmas and the whole holiday season, but it's not one that I feel is positive. So the rest of you can have your cynicism and joylessness. I'll be singing Christmas carols at the top of my lungs in the car and loving every minute of this 2007 holiday season.