The last couple of nights have been rather cool, presaging the coming of winter. With that and Thanksgiving coming up, I've started thinking about the Holiday Season. For most people this is a giddy time. The goodwill and festive atmosphere perks me up at least, and brightens many people up too.

Every year it seems that I never come into the Holiday Season with plans of buying *any* presents for anyone. People do still give me presents, but I've sort of discouraged that from my family at least since I buy so much stuff for myself throughout the year. I'm still happy to get presents, and I understand as gift-giving is a happy occassion for both parties.

But as the season progresses I get the urge to buy presents. I'm constantly bombarded with commercials and billboards and other people talking about Christmas. And as I wander in a store I'll see things that I can buy for other people. As Christmas gets near it's much more likely that I'll buy those items.

The other, sadder aspect of the Holiday Season is that it can be tremendously depressing if you don't have family or close friends to share it with. I've experience this once. One year everyone was gone on trips and such, and it was boring. The weather does not help either. Overcast and rainy day after dark day is also a big downer. With both these things working on a person, I'm not surprised that the Holiday Season also has the most suicides.

Sunny days are actually quite cheerful. I may hate hot days and wish for a nice weeklong storm to break the heat wave. But it's much better than living under constant cloud cover. A world of darkness (not the RPG) combined with seeing everyone else so deliriously upbeat can be rather crushing to one's spirit. It's strange, I suppose. This was before I became the unreasonably cheerful person that I am. Nowadays I can be happy seeing other people happy, or at least buy lots of stuff and make myself feel better.

Which brings me to a slight change of topic. Sometimes I'm way too generous foe my own good. But it's fun. Once there was this charity auction (multi-day, not real-time) and I bid on this one magazine, something like $50. As the auction went on and other things got bid on I felt bad that this bunch of art that some fan had drawn had no bids. So I bid on that, but someone beat me to it. So, since I had already bid on those things, I added that money to my magazine bid. Later on I bid up my magazine bid again to $300, without anyone else ever bidding on that magazine.

Just recently... last week in fact, I bought someone an one of the new iMacs (400 MHz DV). This is one of my aquaintances on the Net, who had ordered a 350 MHz iMac, but those weren't due for another three weeks and he was rather sad. With some prodding I found out that this iMac was a gift from a guy who buys computers for people with disabilities. Inspired, I offered to make up the difference, and eventually paid for the whole thing.

He's quite happy. I'm happy that he's happy. Today is also his birthday so I said it was a birthday present. This is what happens when you have too much disposable income, as I often say to people when I buy random things that I don't need.