Christmas cheer born from ambivalence

As a youth I was quite cynical i/r/t the holidays, christmas especially. When I was pre-pubescent christmas always meant a trip south to Oklahoma to visit the grandparents. This entailed a two day drive through some of the most dull landscapes this country has to offer. Utah... come on, what was Joseph Smith thinking, expect for the Moab what has Utah got? A lake so full of crap that you can nearly walk on it? Exciting. A bunch of blue eyed, blonde haired mormons running around, procreating like rabbits, starting polygamist cults that the government turns a blind {& envious} eye to? Hee-Yah! So down through Utah, into Colorado, a brief drive through Kansas & then the Sooner State. {Odd bit of trivia for you: both Oregon's and Oklahoma's state beverage is milk and their state dance is the square dance, while Utah has neither a state beverage nor a state dance. (Though if they did I'm sure it would be water and some weird cultural [read: cult initiation] dance where in the end the dancer has shimmied out of his/her religious underwear in preparation for wild rabbit sex, respectively.)} Some years my parents would throw in a curve-ball & drive through Wyoming {the "Equality" State, sure, tell that to Matthew Shepard}, bypassing the Beehive State altogether. For this drive I am situated between my brothers who aren't pre-pubescent at all, but stinky, hairy, engorged boys, making all kinds of raucous comments and constantly crossing the line which I drew up early in the trip and had informed them shouldn't be crossed in any manner for any reason.
Once in Oklahoma we would typically stay with my father's parents, in the home he had grown up in. On my parent's end this meant a week of attempting to avoid arguments with my father's siblings, who he didn't much appreciate and who didn't really like him, while for us kids it meant feigning camaraderie with cousins we met only once a year while secretly taking bets on whose dad could kick the other's ass. Also we were never allowed to play twister, this memory has stuck with me. & the cashews, there were cashews everywhere, in little decorative bowls in every room. To this day I cannot eat a cashew.
These trips embittered me to christmas but now I find where once I was pathologically anti-christmas I am now just numb & even this is petering out. Twice now I've gone to the mall with it in mind to ridicule all the shoppers {this being an ol' yule tide joy of mine} and I didn't have the heart to poke fun, I even ended up buying a gift for someone. I found myself smiling at all the children so excited & amazed with everything around them. While not dropping change into the Salvation Army's can I also wasn't scheming ways to boost what was already there. Am I a changed man? Who knows...
Happy birthday you old martyr you.