I walked past my city’s Cathedral, yesterday. Clearly, in the past, this week would be the second busiest week of the year, for the (Anglican) bishopric, but there was barely a peep out of it…

Some very needy, QR-code-involving signs, but no real decoration, no one going in or out… And this is the largest church in the whole state…

Some photography group was taking photos of the outside, but that’s about it.

Then I went to a Christmas “food market”, and it was, well, the closest it got to “Christmas” was decorations, an appearance by Santa (initially hidden in a giant paper candle, while he was wheeled in, lol), and a jazz band of danger hairs performing woke, “Christmas-adjacent” songs (“Christmas in LA”, anyone? Erykah Badu, anyone?)…

Aside from that, it’s like the city (with a Greens council, no less) barely cares anymore. Everything is “Season’s Greetings”, “Happy Holidays”, or, like, “Happy Summer”.

People really only care about being able to make money out of it, getting a few days off, a fucking yacht race, and a Summer food festival that starts on Tuesday… In fact, I would say there is more New Years’ stuff around, than Christmas, sadly…

Some of this is symptomatic of being in the Southern Hemisphere, granted, but it’s interesting that in places with higher numbers of first-gen British expats in Australia, which are also more conservative (notably Perth, but also Brisbane and Sydney), I’ve seen much more “Christmas-ness”, I suppose…

But I also don’t remember it being like this when I was a kid, or even like a decade ago, so… It’s just a bit weird, to me, I guess.

Anyone else have this sort of “less Christmassy Christmas”, where you are..? It’s probably mostly an Anglosphere problem, but I feel like somewhere like California (or maybe even Scotland) is probably just as bad, if not worse, lol…