The 25th, 2016

It’s that time of year again. A large number of people are hopefully stuffing their faces with food, or opening presents. There may be snow falling on the Daily SPUF, but across the planet, even in summer-time Australia, there’s people celebrating Christmas. Most people like Christmas, if only because it’s a day off work and you can eat whatever you want and no one will judge you. Plus, you get presents, unless you’re a freakish fool like me who doesn’t like receiving gifts. No, seriously, don’t.

Christmas is also a time for charity. All over the place, selfless people are being nice and giving time, food, money, whatever, to help other people. This happens throughout the year, but the festive spirit means you can convince more people to be nice to each other. Or at the very least, convince people to buy stuff from your business in exchange for you giving things to charity. This means everyone wins – the company makes some extra Christmas profit and doesn’t look like a heartless monster, a charity can now help more people and customers get a nice warm feeling in the spot where their heart once was.

Here at home, I’ve done a few charitable things. I went through my cupboards with my sister and we dropped off a huge bag of food, books and stuffed animals to the Cancer Patients Support Group. I also bought a bunch of random gifts in Warframe to give to extra players, as they’re doing weird “gift people stuff and we gift gifts to people for charity as well” event. Kudos to the community, they’ve really gone all out on the gift giving. And of course, I’m always willing to be a listener to all your rants and anger and whatnot.

The charity is nice and briefly warms my cold, dead heart. But unfortunately things haven’t been bright or sunny.

At the time of writing, I’m rationing electricity because the solar power system for my home isn’t working, which means I’m rationing the batteries on my laptop and on my phone in case I can’t change them. We’re bleeding money, having to pay for things that constantly need fixing. On top of that, my beloved doggie Colin is missing. My parents are both having breakdowns, Terroxy and I are depressed and my otherwise permanently cheerful sister has finally been beaten down and is just as depressed as the rest of us.

Things aren’t going well.

But hopefully, things will improve. Christmas presents, a nice, big lunch, spending time with family and friends… these are all traditional Christmas things and they’ll always make me feel a bit better. Tiny steps. We need to keep a smile on our faces and it’s been incredibly hard to do so. All that nice, Christmas tradition should at least help me carry over to the end of the year, when shit gets real.

As for the rest of you, I hope that you’re all doing well. I know not everyone celebrates a holiday on the 25th of December, but no matter what you’re doing, I hope you all have a wonderful day, and a wonderful rest of 2016.

Happy Smissmas, everyone.