i cry every time i see a christmas tree.
all the christmases i skipped come rushing back.
i’m taken back to the lonely time before christmas break in high school, when i watched others receive presents, but had no friends of my own that i cared enough to give a present to.
the christmas tree that sat in our living room, never taken down. decorated once but never again. diluting the meaning of christmas by its permanence.
i never understood what it felt like to celebrate a holiday and what it felt like to have parents who are festive. the most they’ve done for my birthday was remember, and for a holiday, acknowledge that it existed.
all the magic behind holiday rituals fall apart without enough care, lose their foundation when you don’t believe in them.
i grew up really fast because i never felt the magic. i brushed away holidays as occurrences capitalism created to have a rotation of different decorations to sell to keep it interesting.
this month i went to a christmas event and there i helped with set up christmas decorations. we wore santa hats, passed around stockings, and dressed up in cozy sweaters. it felt like it made up for every single year i had missed christmas. i felt like a kid again.
i think of paul graham’s quote from ‘life is short’:
having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. if christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. and while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. if you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
if i ever had a kid i’d like to keep the magic of them being a kid for as long as possible. i won’t let the world take it away from them.
growing up is for those who’ve lost the magic in life. i can’t let that happen. i’m going to disney world this month to remind myself what being a kid is like because i’m at the age where i’m starting to feel it slip through my fingertips.
who started this trend of asking a kid “what do you want to be when you grow up?” stop asking the kid and start handing them things and seeing what happens. watch what clicks with them and move the walls in the world that lets them stumble into these opportunities more. if someone falls in love with something, it’ll radiate on their face, it’ll light them up in the way they talk about it, it’ll be evident in the output produced. you wouldn’t need to add parameters or measurements to compare them to others because it’s just too obvious.
it’s the same reason why feedback surveys aren’t necessary. instead of asking someone to take a survey, look at the data and patterns to see how people behave. if someone likes something they will buy it again. if someone likes a certain food they will order it again. you don’t need to ask them if they like it. you don’t need to ask “how many stars would you rate this,” you’ll just know from their actions.
this needs to be reflected in the school system if we don’t want wonders of learning to collapse. stop asking what major they are, what classes they’re taking, what their gpa is. ask them what they love, what they find interesting, and let the system be flexible enough so they can forge their own paths. like a sandbox game. life should just be as flexible as minecraft. do whatever you want.
you never know how someone’s interests relate until you connect the dots backward. and they don’t know either. but if they’re going after the things they love, it won’t ever feel like it wasn’t worth it.
and god forbid don’t make a factory to produce kids that are only good at one thing they don’t love because then they’ll be too replaceable by a machine that can do it better without needing to feel love. especially a factory minting out students that can only talk to a computer because then they would become slave to the immortal machine consuming their finite days and knowledge. like an othello board flipping each human trait into a parameter. computers have all the time in the world, they don’t need us to go talk to them.
oh oops.
i guess we’re too curious to go tinker with pandora’s box and talk to computers because we’re bored of talking to each other. and talking to computers ruins our health but also provides stable health insurance to offset that.
but maybe it’s not too late. computers don’t have the ability to feel like we do. it might not be an advantage but it’s what makes us different. we are explorative emotional creatures and if we let go of that we’re no different than a computer model built for one specific task but we are worse at that one task.
let’s not forget how to feel. computers will never feel christmas like we do. so let’s keep the magic.
growing up with asian immigrant parents, this line hit hard: "i never understood what it felt like to celebrate a holiday and what it felt like to have parents who are festive. the most they’ve done for my birthday was remember, and for a holiday, acknowledge that it existed."
so real 😔 we ought to reclaim growing up as not a cynical loss of innocence but rather as a rediscovery and integration of the inner child