I like starting things way more than I like ending them.

Meeting someone new, discovering a new place to eat or travelling to a new country twinkle with a special brightness. The goodbyes are always difficult, as it is to bid farewell to that lovely coffee shop with reasonable prices and left-field recipes. The airports always look worse when you are leaving.

Starting a new book is exciting; ending it is exhausting. It almost leaves an emotional hangover behind.

Listening to a song for the first time cannot be recreated. It’s just the first time only. From the second onwards, it waters down a notch.

The atmosphere is electrifying at the beginning of a concert, you can smell the anticipation, you can almost touch the tension. The endings are sweaty, anti-climactic, with confetti and plastic cups all over the floor. The lights are on, and you walk aimlessly, without knowing what to do.

Maybe this is why I like starting the year way more than I like finishing it. And yet paradoxically, both things are the same. A fine arbitrary imaginary line separates the evening of the 31st from the very early morning of the 1st.

Winter arrives with a marathon of festivities every year. The uber-capitalistic Halloween hit us with a fiery pumpkin and the run starts, not with a gunshot, but with an evil witch laugh. October is followed by the very very American thanksgiving that suddenly got semi-globalised since every single human being in the world likes much more drinking and eating than working.

So any excuse is great to start the Christmas festivities as soon as possible.
Let’s go for drinks because why not and organise a dinner because why not. Let’s put a red hat on because someone has heard Mariah Carey on the radio even though it’s only November. Also, let’s say farewell to Juan that needs to go back to Spain by the 19th of December because his grandma would get mad otherwise. And for the orthodox, Christmas lasts until the first week of January, and for the Spanish as well, not for religion but for convenience.

Christmas is an intense period. Anybody is rarely impartial to Christmas. People usually love it or hate it. I used to belong to the group of haters. In part because is much more fun to hate and go against the general public, but also because I honestly hated Christmas. There are literally three things I like about Christmas:

The food.

It is acceptable to be drunk anytime.

Shitty Christmas movies.

I hate the pretend happiness. The ruthless capitalism. The consumerism. I hate the endless eating. The buffoonery that those working in hospitality suffer during these times. Needing to deal with people that I haven’t chosen. The music.

I used to hate it all viciously.

Let me elaborate extemporaneously for no reason at all. I do love eating. I don’t cook as much as I should, but when I do I reconnect with that primal side of feeling homely, like when my grandma used to give me and my brother coffee with milk with homemade custard after an autumn meal.

I consider myself an optimist. Yes, I am gritty, my humour is absurdly bleak and I see all sides (and I mean all) of reality because life IS complicated, convoluted and chaotic. But I have learnt to tame the feelings within and look at the bright side, with honesty and without falling into the ridiculousness of toxic positivity that frosts everything these days.
But Christmas is too exhausting. Too demanding.

As I said, INTENSE.

I’m sure that anthropologically (and I’m saying this without any data because I am not a scientist) convergent cultural evolution has happened a lot for the winter festivities in different geographical points, whatever they are. Winter is a classically a tough time, especially when food was not as available as it is now in the contemporary rotten liberal neo-capitalism.

Therefore, it makes sense to organically led to celebrating a festivity that protects the vulnerable and demands feasts in the most problematic season of the year. The origin of this clambake is rooted in the celebration of the birth of the new solar year. This is a levity of inner renewal. Mother Earth gives birth to the Sun Child with Old Father Winter. See the coincidences?

The Persian Mithraists held December 25th as the sacred day of their Sun God, conquering victory of light over darkness. For three days, December 22nd, 23rd and 24th, the sun rises at the exact same latitudinal degree. This is the only time in the year that the sun stops its movement northward or southward in our sky. On the morning of December 25th, the sun moves one degree northward beginning its annual journey back to us in the northern hemisphere, ultimately bringing our spring.

This yearly event of the death and re-birth of the Light led to the annual celebration of the Festival of the Winter Solstice in different pagan cultures. Before monotheism, this celebration was highlighted by communal bonfires and candles for the homes, all in honour of the re-birth of the fiery sun, the timeless symbol of their Life-Giver. Feasting, gift-giving and oftentimes excessive revelry became part of this celebration. Evergreen trees (pines and firs) were considered sacred, as they remained forever green throughout the year.

A pine tree was cut down each year, carried to the temples and decorated with a star on top, for the ancients knew that a star was simply, well, the sun. The Romans took it and tweaked it, by adding inversion of social roles, in which slaves would dress and eat like masters and so on and called it Saturnalia. And when a cordial Emperor changed the religion, Christians tried very hard (like very very hard) to get rid of it, but defeated, assimilated it instead. People like eating, drinking and exchanging presents far too much.

It is the ultimate check-in of life. The definitive pit stop. It makes you look inside, and then outside. It puts everyone together at the finish line, the same line that turns out to be the starting line for the next year when the sun is still frozen in the big grey sky. And it is in the nature of every human to split hairs on reality, to look, form little opinions and to compare ourselves.

This is why I never really connected to it.

A darker, grittier feeling when starting a new year might involve a sense of negativity or disappointment about the past or a feeling of uncertainty about the future. Although as years pass I see myself feeling less of both. Being more content, feeling less chaotic.

Somehow the high points are a little bit less high, and the teenager inside me cries, almost making me question if my life is exciting enough, full enough if my life is lived enough.

The lows are less low too, less deep, easier to manage and predictable. But in good homo sapiens fashion, I have a tendency to dismiss anything positive about myself.

It’s the small battles, the little things that no one notices.

Do not fall asleep watching some movie or series.
Learn to wait.
Listen more ( I did not promise to talk less).
Eat healthily and cook. Become a domestic God.
Exercise, but like, for real. Do it.
Meditate and read more.
Dye your hair ( To keep that eternal teenager that lives within silenced).

But for real tho, DO NOT FALL ASLEEP WATCHING SOME MOVIE OR SERIES.