Holiday Depression

Tara Heubel Eng 101 Section 1130 Essay 2 Final draft Tis the Season For most people the holiday season is a very happy time. It is a time for laughter and rejoicing. It is during the holiday season that we begin to see and hear from loved ones that may not always be in touch. Friends and family from everywhere begin to make contact during this time of year in hopes to send merry wishes for the year and year to come. However not all people are overcome with the “holiday spirit,” but are rather plagued with the feeling of sadness and loneliness.

This small group of people struggle through the holiday season. There are many different variables that may lead to this frustration during this time of year. No matter what the reason may be for feeling so down, the fact remains that for these individuals the holidays cause serious depression. With all the celebrating that takes place during the holidays host and hostesses may just be the most underrated people working hard to make the holiday celebration a great success!

Unless you are the yearly host of a holiday get together, you really have no idea about the burden and stress that can be placed on the person who is coordinating the celebration. There are people to invite, food to purchase and prepare, decorations to hang, presents to wrap, and an atmosphere to set. The host of the party is usually preparing for the main event several months ahead of time, that is if he or she is smart, to be sure that nothing is forgotten. After all, there won’t be another party like this one till next year.

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If the party goes well it will be talked about all year long and people will be excited to return for future celebrations! This is ideally what every host is hoping to achieve. The perfect celebration! Every year the media portrays holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years as even bigger and bigger events. They run an unlimited amount of advertisements portraying perfect celebrations with the perfect decorations and the perfect meal. Every home is filled with laughing faces and happy hearts. It is as if you have stepped right into a Norman Rockwell painting!

People are compelled to be wearing the perfect outfit. They hope to give and to receive the perfect gift. They anticipate eating the perfect holiday feast with all the wonderful side dishes and rows of lavish desserts, pies, and cookies! It should not go unmentioned that all this striving for perfection is the perfect recipe for holiday depression and stress. With all this emphasis placed on the perfect celebration; God forbid you make a mistake! Lets just think about it for a second, have you ever been to the grocery store or any shopping environment for that matter during the holidays?

It is nothing short of mass chaos! There are gangs of last minute shoppers and frustrated consumers tearing through what is left of seasonal or holiday items. To be such a supposed jolly time of year, there are many, many angry people shopping. With everyone feeling the stress of this time of year it seems to bring out a darker side of us in the form of what I like to call “shopping rage. ” People are frantically searching for last minute gift ideas or perhaps they just realized they had forgotten something detrimental for their feast or decor.

Another popular reason for spending hours of wasted stress filled time is due to finding the right attire to model during the get together. This outfit rarely gets worn ever again after the four or five hours you’ve had it on it ends up in the back of the closet never to be seen again. This is of course after you have spent three hours finding it, trying on several combinations of red, green, black, and gold. Making sure to match and pull together every last article of clothing from the jewelry to the shoes and everything in between.

About One hundred and fifty dollars later you have the perfect outfit that you will never wear again! Wanting things to work out perfectly, becomes an obsession for the individual who is burdened with the responsibility of executing the most memorable celebration. Only in a perfect world does everything always work out as planned. In this world however, there are just too many opportunities for something not to work out as planned so mistakes and accidents should be expected. Not everyone is able to accept this truth though.

Some people end up spending so much time worrying about doing everything so right that they end up missing out on the “good stuff” like the time spent with loved ones. These people spend the whole holiday depressed and stressed out about meeting out materialistic cultures ideal standards for the holiday celebrations. With all the celebrating and gift giving, and decorating and throwing parties and preparing grand meals, and everything else that is associated with the holidays does anyone ever stop to ponder the incre`dible amount of money that is dumped by the millions every year into generating the “holiday season? I am sure it comes as no surprise that most people save all year long just to be prepared for this time of year. Everywhere you look during this time of year there are advertisements, one after another, urging people to spend, spend, SPEND! These ads always seem to suggest that if you don’t have an over the top lavish party that is even bigger and better than the last, then you have failed as a human to do what was expected of you during the holidays. There is truly something lost in all this misinterpreted meaning of the holidays.

I mean when did celebrating time with the ones you love become such “BIG BUSINESS? ” For far too many people the holiday season brings about serious depression caused by the inability for these people to afford the ridiculous things that they feel must be purchased in order to have a “proper” celebration especially if they have children. Parents always want their kids to have the best of the best and they want to buy them whatever gift it is that they have wanted and asked for all year long! However, people who don’t have enough money to get these things are struck with a great deal of depression.

These same people may not have enough money to purchase everything society says we need for an extravagant meal or over the top decorations and parties. For all of these things have nothing at all to do with the true meaning of the holidays, still somehow far too much importance has been placed on materialistic things. No matter what the reason may be for a person felling the strain of holiday blues weighing them down, the fact remains that the holiday season can cause a great deal of sadness and depression for many different people.

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