I feel like our family have always been good about not fussing over who spent how much. You give what you feel comfortable giving. Doesn't reflect on you poorly if other people bought more expensive presents. I'm buying slightly bigger presents this year because I can finally afford it, but it's still frankly quite restrained and I started buying them already last month, so it's spaced out over 3 months of paychecks.

Yeah my family is similar but I still sometimes feel under pressure about it but I don’t know if that’s been because I have only earned buttons for most of my working life or because I always left my Xmas shopping until December. I decided this year to start shopping really early and I hand made a few gifts so I’m looking forward to giving those out :).

That's cool. I don't think I'm skilled enough with arts & crafts to make anything nice by hand at all.

You would be very surprised by how easy it is. I have faith in you :D

You haven't seen my abominable attempts at doing paintings or papercrafts.

At least I'm pretty good at wrapping gifts.

Antisemitism is a made-up bullsh!t buzzword used to conjure sympathy and deflect attention from real problems. You're better than that OH.

Besides Anteater and myself, I don't recall anyone calling out Israel for their crimes. And Israel is synonymous with Judaism, so it's not like I'm erroneously conflating the two.

Most major religions have horrible pasts and major problems. The fact that we can point out ALL of them EXCEPT for Judaism is what pisses me off and makes me take up arms against them. The day that people talk about the horrors of Judaism in the same breath as they do the Crusades, Islamic terrorism or religious ritual genital mutilation, is the day that I stop beating my drum.

We usually get up early on the 25th and celebrate. Plus, the tree is inside for the entire month.

Doesn't it lose a ton of needles, or do you put it in water? The sort of pine we have loses a fair amount of needles before it gets taken down at January 1st. It will have been in water before it gets taken inside, but not after that. No live lights on it except the 24th, of course. It becomes more of a fire hazard with each day it has to dry out.

I usually use a fake tree. I've never felt bad about it until now LOL.

Plastic isn't very nice :(

But I understand if it's more practical.

We keep our trees inside too because of that very few people here would get a real Christmas tree. We wait until the morning of the 25th for celebrations too :).


I used to work with a girl from Catalan and they have the most bizarre Christmas traditions. I actually thought she was making it up lol they have athing called Tio De Nadal :laughing: look it up.