11 posts tagged “christmas”
I got a pretty bracelet, a bathrobe, some DVDs, and of course a life-size cutout of Barack Obama.
My least favorite holiday tradition is listening to people gripe about how they're not "allowed" to say Merry Christmas, and how Christmas has become politically incorrect. As if anybody has been stopping them from saying Merry Christmas! As if the entire American culture is not absolutely saturated in Christmas. Tonight I was listening to some of my library co-workers voice this tired old grievance, and I thought to myself, are you insane? Do you really think Christmas is discriminated against? Skip the talk radio rhetoric for a minute, and think about your real-life experience. Your workplace, the public library, is closed on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve. Do we close for Hanukkah? Or even for Yom Kippur? No, of course not. It ain't Christmas that's discriminated against. I know that it's common sense policy to close for Christian holidays when the vast majority of your employees are Christian. I wouldn't say we should stay open; I just say Christians should stop with the gripes, already.
I know some people are reacting against retailers who say Season's Greetings or Happy Holidays. It annoys me, too, but I get annoyed from a different angle. It's phony inclusion. The neutral "Happy Holidays" is usually set against a background of evergreens, red and green packages, reindeer, etc. etc. If a major retailer had a "Happy Holidays" ad that included kids spinning a dreidl (for Hanukkah) or lighting a kinara (for Kwanzaa) or reading Bertrand Russell (for whatever holiday we atheists should invent) then I'd believe in the sincerity of their attempts at diversity.
One of my co-workers once proclaimed her intention to say "Merry Christmas" to everyone she meets, and she said, "I don't care if they don't celebrate Christmas. I celebrate Christmas." I thought to myself, when it's your birthday, do you go around wishing everyone happy birthday? Because if you do, you're f*ing insane.
Intermarried atheist that I am, I love Christmas. I honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. Anyone may wish me a Merry Christmas who pleases. Nobody's stopping you, least of all me. It might be nice to wish my husband a happy Hanukkah along the way, if you can stomach the political correctness of it all.
This morning, I'm heading over to the churchyard to put wreaths on my parents' graves. I've never missed a year, and that means I've spent more Christmases with my mother dead than alive. Whenever I'm feeling economically pinched, I always say I'll stop buying presents for the dead people, but somehow I always find the time and money for a modest piece of greenery. It's nice to set aside the time for some quiet memories.
After the graves, I need to head out and look for presents for the people I supervise at work. The challenge is to find something inexpensive enough that I don't resent the obligation, yet nice enough that the recipients don't know how cheap I am. I usually get a variation of the same thing for everyone, since people in my workplace are very prickly and quick to sniff out anything they perceive as unfair. It reminds me of when I was set loose to buy family presents at age four or so, and went up to the clerk and said, "I want six handkerchiefs, please."
Then some fun shopping, for people I actually care about. Then start writing out the cards. Then, tonight, haul out the DVDs and pick a holiday movie. I'm voting for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
I'm a real fool about Christmas trees. I'll only accept a real one, because I enjoy vacuuming up the needles, I guess. I won't buy a tree "off the rack." No, we have to trek about 45 minutes into the country and cut it down ourselves. I must have a fraser fir, and it must have the proper spirit and have jaunty branches.
I love the process whereby the tree we cut down becomes The Tree. Well, I hate putting on the lights, and I'm not crazy about the bead garland, but when we haul out the boxes of nostalgia from the storage room, I get all misty eyed. The angel I've had since babyhood. The glass ball with a tree inside from my German grandma. The ornament my husband made from the stump of our first tree together. The ballerina with the physically impossible pose that always made my niece laugh. The Shiney Brites from mom that I left off the tree for years, until I realized they're not old, they're retro.
I don't have kids, so I used to have my nieces over to "help" decorate the tree and bake cookies (all the cute ornaments crowded in one place about three feet off the floor; my kitchen covered in flour). Now they're grown and gone, so husband and I have a civilized adult evening planned tomorrow to sanctify our tree as best as humanists can sanctify anything, with love and laughter.
I wrote about the emergence of "River" as a new Christmas standard last year. I'm sure the New Republic writers must be reading this blog, and that's why they're jumping on my bandwagon.
Today my husband and I were shopping downtown, and we wandered into our local witch store. We stayed true to our holiday tradition of browsing around the store and not buying anything (we are cheapskates). We walked out of the store and stood for a second on the sidewalk, regrouping and deciding where to go next, and suddenly the proprietor ran out of the store carrying a three-panel room divider. She thrust it in our hands, saying to my husband, "You've been wanting to buy this for her for three years. Happy Yule!" Indeed, my husband has been coveting this item for a long time and had asked to buy it, but the divider was not for sale; it was part of the store's fixtures.
Merchants don't usually go around giving stuff away at Christmas time, especially in the tourist town where we live. I was incredibly touched by her generosity to people that she doesn't know and who are scarcely good customers, since we never actually buy anything there. What a sweetie. Hmm, I wonder if the upscale gift store down the street, owned by the Moravian church, would give their stuff away. Somehow I doubt it.
The December 21st Washington Post has an article about Joni Mitchell's song "River" showing up on all the Christmas albums this year:
I'm so glad to see it. "Both Sides Now" has been covered umpteen million times and that's nice, but if "River" works its way into the Christmas canon, that will mean royalty pennies not just for Joni but for her grandchildren!
In honor of the winter solstice, here's a verse from Susan Cooper, who wrote it for the
Christmas Revels in the 1970s.
The Shortest Day
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!
The song that seems to be popping up on all the holiday CDs this year is Joni Mitchell’s River. The most high profile covers are on Sarah McLachlan’s beautiful CD, Wintersong, and on James Taylor at Christmas. It’s also been covered by Linda Ronstadt, Robert Downey Jr, and even Barry Manilow (ouch).
This is not your typical Christmas song. It is sad. It is unsentimental. It is unflinchingly honest. It is Joni. I never used to think of it as a Christmas song, but I guess it fits in nicely with that subgenre of Morose Holiday Music (with Blue Christmas, First Christmas Away from Home, the original Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and of course, oh my god, the Coventry Carol).
Awhile back, Joni was talking about releasing a Morose Christmas CD of her own, but it looks like that isn’t going to happen. She is recording a new album of original material, though, which is supposed to be released in 2007. Watch this space.
I am a humanist, which is a way to say I’m an atheist
without getting immediately beaten up.
You might expect me to be pretty cynical about Christmas, but you’d be
wrong. Not only do I keep a big,
exuberant Christmas, I keep a Christmas that has spirit and depth and meaning
way beyond the shopping mall ethos of our times, if I may say so myself.
I even have a nativity scene in my living room. I probably don’t have any right to have one, but
the Christmas story has always resonated with me. It’s full of such human, homely details like
unwed pregnancy and the tedium of travel and overbooked hotels. The idea of the big, big God taking the form
of a tiny human baby is so moving to me.
For me as a humanist, Christmas is about hope, as
exemplified in the birth of any baby, let alone a baby god. It is about the human potential for
good. It is about social justice,
raising poor folk and casting down the proud.
It is about what is beautiful about being human on this green
earth. It is not a fast day. It is not about atonement or even,
particularly, about reverence. It is a
feast day. Look at all the delights for
our human senses that this holiday affords us:
the music, the food, the decorations, the smells, the food.
My Christmas even has a written gospel, of sorts. It’s the Gospel of Dickens. A
Christmas Carol argues for a Christmas spirit that encompasses
“liberality,” justice, forgiveness and the basic human right of frivolity. The references to Jesus in that book are few
indeed. I wouldn’t say that Jesus is beside the point. I would say perhaps that the existence of
Jesus is sufficient, but not necessary, for the ethic that Dickens is
presenting.
Maybe my Christmas mania is just a reflection of my northern European blood that needs to light candles against the darkness. So why do I call this holiday Christmas when I reject the notion of Christ? Because that’s what I grew up calling it, and because the phrase “winter holiday” is really lame.
