{"id":36181,"date":"2016-12-25T11:37:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-25T16:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=36181"},"modified":"2016-12-25T11:37:36","modified_gmt":"2016-12-25T16:37:36","slug":"merry-christmas-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=36181","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Between the time I moved out of my parent&#8217;s house and the time I got married, I spent a few years living alone. The holidays are strange when you&#8217;re alone. You don&#8217;t want to decorate, because it feels like you&#8217;re decorating for yourself. You could cook a meal, but you&#8217;re just cooking for yourself, and you already do that every night. What else are you going to do? Sing Christmas carols to yourself? Maybe buy yourself a present? Get hammered on eggnog and watch Die Hard<span class='snote' title='1'>On Christmas Eve I watched Die Hard with my son. It was his first time seeing it. He seemed to like it well enough, although I don&#8217;t think it will be the Christmas Classic for his generation that it was for mine.<\/span> by yourself?<\/p>\n<p>Actually I guess that last one kind of works.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from the religion and consumerism, this time of year is about family and friendship. That&#8217;s a good thing to celebrate. But if you&#8217;re alone, then the holiday can make you feel even more alone. It feels like everyone else is eating awesome food, swapping presents, singing carols, and watching kitschy Christmas movies together while you sit in your non-decorated place eating non-holiday food. Everyone else is doing something you aren&#8217;t and if you try to do anything festive on your own it end up feeling sad and forced, like Kevin McCallister making a fake party in Home Alone. Except unlike Kevin, not even evil Joe Pesci wants to visit you.<\/p>\n<p>So to all my friends and family who live alone: I&#8217;m thinking of you. Hope you enjoy yourself, however you decide to spend the day.<\/p>\n<p>To everyone who isn&#8217;t alone: What are you doing here? It&#8217;s Christmas. Stop reading my blog and go do holiday stuff. You can read this when you roll into work on Tuesday morning feeling hungover and tired.<\/p>\n<p>Merry Christmas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Between the time I moved out of my parent&#8217;s house and the time I got married, I spent a few years living alone. The holidays are strange when you&#8217;re alone. You don&#8217;t want to decorate, because it feels like you&#8217;re decorating for yourself. You could cook a meal, but you&#8217;re just cooking for yourself, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}