The Upsides and Downsides of Christmas

Christmas is a grand time of the year, where families get together and celebrate the birth of Christ, or so one hopes, by gifting and feasting whilst having the day off from work. However, people also tend to forget the bad side of this holiday event.

Upside: People have the day off work to celebrate with their families.
Downside: Police officers, people working in the hospitality industry, people working in hospitals, people driving trucks, Santa Clause and his reindeer and elves and other people who have to work on the day unfortunately do not.

Upside: People who work on Christmas Day get paid a fair bit more money than when they work on other days.
Downside: That money will have to replace the money that went to buying gifts for people that cannot afford buying themselves things, and the rest of it will most likely be blown away on Boxing Day.

Upside: Most of the world celebrates Christmas. Most shops have exquisitely beautiful Christmas decorations up to lure and amuse customers, and people of Facebook and Instagram post photographs of their Christmas trees and Christmas gifts, and begin to check themselves into their grandparents’ homes to indicate that they are indeed celebrating Christmas without having to cook, but just eat.
Downside: Muslims and non-celebrators of Christmas have Christmas rubbed into their faces from the visible decorations, television commercials and social networking posts, and into their ears from radio stations.

Upside: Christmas Carols.
Downside: The repetition of Christmas Carols.

Upside: Celebrating Christmas by feasting with loved ones and receiving really good gifts after gifting people with what you intended to be good gifts and having a minor panic attack in thinking that while you spent a lot of money on the person, you may not receive a gift back but feeling relieved that you did receive a gift back.
Downside: Celebrating by feasting and gifting without acknowledging Jesus’ birthday. The poor guy was born in a manger, amidst the rancid animal smells.

Upside: Anticipating the arrival of Christmas and making plans to see and be with and feast with people you do not normally see often.
Downside: The obligatory need to celebrate – this comes from media, shopping malls, strangers and relatives. People which accumulate to the epitome of the idea of The Grinch have trouble focusing on hating other things in the world because they are focusing on how horrid it is to know that most of their friends are with other friends and family sharing a nice roasted piece of ham whilst they are sitting at home watching Season Three of Friends with their pet cats snuggled around them.

Upside: Buying really good gifts for your family members and feeling great about yourself for it when you see the look on their faces when they open your gift and realize how cool it is, and how cool you are.
Downside: Not experiencing the family members you have gifted opening their gifts because, again, you have had to buy gifts intended for one person but in reality it is meant for another because wogs like to play ‘pass the parcel’ with their Christmas gifts, despite how much money you spent on them or how applicable the gift is to their personality and interests – they are sure that their relatives will enjoy it regardless. But they thank you anyway and pretend as though they will open it when they are home, but when you are at the other relative’s house and look under their Christmas tree and notice the all too familiar wrapping paper holding the all too familiar shape, reality slaps you in your face and you sink into their sofa and promise that you will never do this again.

Upside: Promising not to buy your wog relatives gifts anymore to save yourself some money seeing as though they gift others based on what you pay.
Downside: Giving in to the Christmas spirit and buying your wog relatives gifts anyway because it is shameful to walk into their house with empty hands in the holiday season, or any season.

Upside: When you did not receive presents and buy yourself a cool present online because you know your interests more than anybody else.
Downside: Online shipping is delayed because of Christmas Day being a day off, so the cool things you ordered late for Christmas will not arrive on Christmas, and you sit there whilst everyone opens their presents, awkwardly flicking your thumbs and wearing a fake smile while your hands are clenched.

Upside: Getting drunk on cheap wine or beer or tequila shots or anything else with alcohol in it.
Downside: Most people celebrate too hard by drinking too much and want to drive around but do not take into account that if they do drive while drunk they may kill not only themselves but other people who have not yet had the chance to celebrate with their loved ones. Drink and drive responsibly, always.

Upside: Being reminded about Christmas time constantly so that you have the chance to make plans and buy gifts and prepare meals.
Downside: Homeless people and people living in third-world or war-torn countries tend to be forgotten by the media and all celebrants of Christmas.

Upside: Having the shops open nice and late so you have something to do and somewhere to go in the event of having finished all pre-Christmas preparations.
Downside: Not being able to tolerate all of the crowds and hoards of people who go to snoop around in shopping malls. Also, having each person want to rub shoulders with you as though you were famous.

Upside: Eggnog, to Americans.
Downside: Eggnog, to me and most Australians. The name makes it sound absolutely revolting and makes me imagine a battered chicken foetus getting poured out of a milk carton. I do not have any intentions whatsoever to place one millilitre of it in my mouth.

Upside: Idea of Mistletoes and having the potential to experience your first Mistletoe kiss.

Downside: Not obtaining a Mistletoe, or obtaining one and having to celebrate with family members and choosing to utterly avoid being underneath it due to the fact that you would prefer your children to have ten fingers and ten toes.

Upside: The food. The glorious Christmas food.

Downside: Having to help wash the dishes because you feel bad for not having cooking skills like the ones your grandma and mother possess.

While there are many more upsides and downsides to list, I will now go and partake in most upsides of Christmas, shutting an eye to the downsides. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake. And while some of you do not celebrate it, I will say Happy Holidays, because it is indeed a holiday.

Parental Attachment and Dependency in Lebanese Children

In the wild, baby animals are generally weaned by their mothers for an average of nine months, depending on what sort of animal they are, and then they are released, so to speak, into the utter wild, with nobody to fend for them but themselves. Whatever danger comes their way becomes their own problem, for now their parents can move on with their lives and find whatever prey to slay, this time for personal consumption rather than the lowest rations, because their babies would have been prioritised.

This is the same way with Australian mothers and children. Children are usually housed until they are eighteen years of age, after which they are gifted a key by several people to indicate their freedoms and to boost their hopes that one day they too can afford a house of their own and to pay for their own phone bills and cook their own chicken parmagiana with a side serving of peas and carrots, and to afford to pay for the electricity so that the can enjoy some shrimp on the barbecue and to watch a round of football on the television after removing an icy cold bottle of VB beer.

However, with wogs, Lebanese people in particular, things for children do not quite flow in this manner. Darwinism is eliminated and rewritten, in that the child, child meaning a son or daughter aged between zero and whatever age they are before they wed a suitor who the parents fall in love with before he or she does, has only two predators: their father or mother, depending on who wears the pants in the marriage when they are angry with the child, or anything in the 'outside world', illicit or totally legal, such as clubbing, Australian children or peers, public transport, alcohol, driving at nighttime, driving in the daytime, driving in the afternoon, not wearing socks or using an ATM machine to withdraw cash without the protection of the child's grandmother. There are many more predators out there, and unfortunately, due to the many types of wogs and beliefs in the world, the list of these predators is too long to mention. It is thus safer, in the Lebanese version of Darwinism, for the child to remain indoors and eat things wrapped in pita bread and to be molly-coddled until a rather exquisite wedding ring states otherwise.

There is no mere weaning in a Lebanese household - there is a constant spying and feasting and nagging and never-ending sadness about things such as out of date food or the latest bombing victims sprawled on live television or missing an episode of a Spanish show that is dubbed in Arabic, even though the missing of this episode will not leave the viewer confused because each episode is a dramatic reenactment of each prior episode - and, mind you, in the viewing of these episodes, the Lebanese child must too watch it and enjoy it even if they speak and understand a dialect which differs from the one being spoken in the series.

The Lebanese child must not argue, and must take into accordance every claim made by their parents as a fact, such as the Lebanese people differentiating from Arabs, the Lebanese people inventing the wheel, the Lebanese people inventing language, the number system and the alphabet, the Lebanese people inventing all good foods and deserts, the Lebanese people being the people of the Lord Jesus and the Lord Jesus being the only leader of religion for any other religion is a demonic one even if Christianity branches into several types and Lebanese people are all different types - all other claims by other cultures are simply false if they claim that they begun either of these great things, for their creations are simply derivatives from all creations by the Lebanese people. 

Lebanese people are not the wagers of war, it is some other form of people that began war and Lebanese people simply have no capabilities or intentions of performing any acts of violence, even though they cluster in gangs in Australia and shank anything with a pair of eyes that ponder near them for a duration of two seconds.

Lebanese children, apart from having a dependence on their parents, also have a dependence on welfare and insurance claims. Centrelink sponsors their vehicular customizations and the acquiring of their three-white-striped pants and nightly meals at McDonald's which follows their meals at home cooked fresh daily for painstaking hours, but I suppose all that hair needs a large amount of vitamins and nutrients from all food sources in order to maintain their Mediterranean shine.

Holidays such as New Years, Christmas, Easter and even Birthdays become a blessing for Lebanese children and their financial statuses because apart from Centrelink, they also are sponsored by their grandparents' pension money. These money-giving times also may happen on weekends, or after the Lebanese child taking their grandmother shopping or dropping their grandfather off at the horse races. The money is usually found lying around curled in their grandparents' old socks, or tucked away in the storage compartments of their sofa-beds. This money may arrive into the hands of the Lebanese children smelling mouldy, but that is just because they have been tucked away for so long, hidden from any source of fingers or light. 

The money Lebanese children have, despite from whence it came, must be spent wisely, and there is no better way to do that than to haggle down the prices of things which have already had their prices reduced due to them being sale items, located in the sale basket, a place where all Lebanese inhabitants of earth enjoy thriving. Although most that they purchase from this place are things that they do not need, their purchase will still please the Lebanese people simply because they are things which have been haggled down twice. They do not, during this time of haggling, take into account the humiliation that their children feel. A sale item reduced to two-dollars must be reduced even more, no matter how loud their voices must go. They fail to keep their claims said to the shopkeepers about five dollars being the only amount they have, because of the fact that their Gucci handbags are full of fifty-dollar notes.

Over-feeding, multiple-cousin support systems, and hundreds of gifted bottles of perfumes are amongst most things that come with being a dependent Lebanese child. While I am indeed dependent, I will enjoy every minute because life as good as this does not come to any other culture.