Why does Christmas feel less "special" every year?

It is a law of life that you cannot relive the past. This is no different than finding that the 1,000'th hearing of your favorite song no longer provides the 'zing' of the first 20. The past is the past, and your past is now chock full of Christmas memories which actually *block* the here-and-now experience of this Christmas, just as it is. It's kind of a complex topic, that has multiple layers to it. But the bottom line is this: a crucial part of what makes any experience special is the "unknown-ness" of the moment: the future is unknown, that flows into this moment as a kind of freedom, and that is like a catalyst to your experience which makes it real, immediate, and emotionally meaningful. You cannot get that by playing back old memories. And in fact, the more old memories you have dominating your experience, the more they shape your expectations and interfere with just having life flow freely from future to present to past. So now you have a bunch of ideas of how Christmas should be, and your mind is continually comparing your feelings and experience to those ideas, and you're trying to steer towards a concept of a past experience instead of experiencing what is actually going on at the moment. Now, if you go and have a couple of kids, you'll see Christmas through new eyes, because the kids will provide that new frame of reference for you. It will be magic, but not the same as when you were a child... a different kind of magic. If you do that enough times, it will no longer be magical. The trick to curing this is to learn where the future is, and steer toward it. You can't know in advance what it will look like, and anything you think you know is just more of the past. The future is always unknown, always risky. You're always trading the certainty of what you know for the possibility of something new.

The magic of Christmas comes through the imagination. So how did you grow up thinking about Christmas? Was it family time, Christmas tree, decorations, lights, music, gifts, no school, and fun? It still is for most families today. You get caught in all the activities Christmas brings----the parties, the change of weather, shopping, cooking traditional foods, and being around people you like. So look to see what is missing in your life. Sometimes it is not the outward things that bring joy so you have to look inside. Whether you are religious or not, you do have a psyche. It needs more than what you have already had. It is no longer feeding it. There are things that feed the spirit----doing things for others that really need help. Why do you things people do so many charitable things on Christmas? It is to feed their spirit. I call it soul work. When I feel like my spirit is sad, I feed it with things to benefit others. Get your mind of yourself. There are many things you can do just look around. You don't even have to do things for other people, it can be to help the environment, or even cheer up your mother, since she is the one putting up the tree. Why aren't you? Like they say, charity begins at home. Maybe you are to old for Santa, but you can be a Santa for other people. You can be the light in someone else's world. What you don't like about your life, you can change. If you don't like the commercializations of Christmas, stay away from shopping at stores. Go online. You won't have to listen to the Christmas music. Simplify your own life and control your own environment. Merry Christmas! Keep the joy and peace in your heart!

One's perspectives about an event changes as we get older. The impressions, expectations, excitement, thrill and what 'else' about it undergoes some stages like reading a story from a book - there's build up of momentum in the plot, a climax then a denouement until the end is finally reached. After that, it is just another book you've read. And it becomes different when you chance upon another "new" book with a different story - you find another ecxitement building up because it s something "new". So it is with Christmas. As a child, it is like reading a new book for the first time, and you get excited about it. But the excitment wears off after that after acertain point. And you may want to move on to a new experience with a new, different book, but there's none that comes a long as with Christmas each year- the same thing goes on and on like an old book that you have already read and don't want to read anymore for the nth time because it offers no new excitement as you know what would happen on the plot or story. Christmas is like that - it becomes boring, monotonous....to a person who have seen the same thing over and over, just like reading the same book over and over.

Maybe there has been too much commercialism and other build up that has eroded what used to feel like special moments about a day that used to feel special.

We're getting older. The magic we felt as kids tends to fade away. The innocence is lost.

Does it? Doesn't seem that way from here.