• Shawn
    12.6k
    It has come to my attention that people, instead of feeling happy, feel sad during the holidays. Suicide rates take an uptick during the holidays due to feelings of loneliness, anger, and alienation.

    We already have a Shoutbox, where people can vent their frustrations and perceived inadequacies or injustices that life has in store for them; but, I wanted to start a specific thread for people who might be feeling blue or sad during this time of year. I will, as usual, be on these forums for the majority of the holidays and can try and put on my 'social worker' hat and try and help people who are feeling sad or suicidal.

    If you have any concerns about how these holidays are shaping up, with or without family, then please feel free to post about it here. I will try and address every post and think that it might turn out to become a good thread.


    Just to be clear, this thread isn't only for those who are feeling suicidal. It can be just simple melancholia, boredom, or sadness of the spirit.


    Best regards,
    Wallows
  • Hanover
    12k
    No sound sweeter than the blues:

  • DiegoT
    318
    We do Christmas wrong. The sad, nostalgic time is meant to be All Saints´ Day, and Halloween; and similar festivals in other religions except islam (as islam is a personality cult and doesn´t follow the rhythms of Nature in its holidays).

    Christmas, or the winter solstice festival, is meant to be beyond that point of tears for the dead, memorials, and balance of the year (which belong to the end of the harvest time). The end of december however, is a turning point in that process, because the sun rises again and days grow longer; it´s a time to regain joy and to share hopes that cold, darkness and (in the past) scarcity of food, will pass and the first signs of rebirth are starting to show.

    So Christmas should be more like Yule or Saturnalia, a very vitalistic carnival where the centre of the action is not at home but outside in the open. The sad Christmas culture is at odd with both the natural cycles and the Christian metanarrative; a Child is born, not mourned.

    This change of paradigm would help people with suicidal tendencies no doubt, because they could rely on Christmas to cope with long winter nights, instead of this frightening visit of ghosts of past, present and future Christmas to lonely people for many nights. Many times you do wrong by trying to do good; and Charles Dickens did a lot more wrong than good with his damned Christmas Carol. I say: Deck the halls with boughs of holly. Have fun, have sex, don´t go near a church at midnight as they are too close to graveyards, and celebrate Nativity of a new cycle instead of the death of this year.
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