I posted this same blog on myspace, so I figure, why not here?

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Yeah, it's here again. That time of year when it starts getting amazingly cold, when the shiny colored lights start going up. The lawn decorations, those houses that seem to go just a tad overboard with Christmas lights, that one guy down the block that almost cuts out the city's electricity because of it.

Then the snow comes. Some years it comes in early December or even November, sometimes we don't see a flake until the end of January. There's Christmas hype, the feeling of impatience and anxiousness for some people, anxiety for others.

But there's one thing that comes from all this. Every year of your life it's been the same thing, December 25th as a kid is the best day of the year. Ever. But I think it's changed just a little, now. Nostalgia is the holiday season's most dominant feeling, for me at least. The lights? That tree? The smell of the cold, crisp winter air? I'm sure you remember Christmas back when you were a kid, nothing in particular, just bits and pieces, and the thing that stands out most is how unbelievably happy you were.

Now, you're happy on Christmas day, and usually throughout the holiday season, and yet, are you ever as happy as you were in those memories? You wish you were that happy, but you're definitely not. Christmas isn't so great anymore, and on the Eve and the day even more so, it just doesn't feel the same as it did years ago.

Why is that? What causes that feeling? Nostalgia. I find it to be the strangest thing, that you can wish you had that same feeling, fond memories, and in the present its just never the same, and eventually these new memories overtake the old. The memories of happiness are downgraded slowly, year after year, until you're 45 and with your own family. You see them having the same fun you did when you were little, but that feeling is gone with age. Yet, you feel just as happy as you did when you were little again, not because of those fond memories, but because you see that same happiness in your children, and you know exactly how it used to feel.

So really, what I really want to know is, for this one day a year, the near embodiment of the childhood spirit, why? Why do we have to grow up?