Jennifer handed out our usual pre-Christmas survey today. Every year she asks us all what things make Christmas Christmas for us. What food do we not want to miss? What events do we want to do? What worked last year? What didn’t work last year? What did we miss last year?
I’m stumped though. I’m having a hard time getting excited for Christmas. I think it’s because I don’t know what Christmas is FOR.
When we were Christians, we had a purpose to Christmas. All of the gift giving and decorations and preparation were ostensibly in honour of the birth of Jesus. Or at least we could pretend they were and feel justified in our bachanalia.
We officially left the church exactly two years ago today. We’re only now starting to really recover from the shock and trauma of that time. The first year was mostly circling the wagons and protecting ourselves from hurt. We’re now starting to open the gates and venture our into the scary world around us. We’re starting to look at Christmas and wonder what to do.
Our preparation and rituals, the things we valued the most about Christmas, are mostly all gone. As Christians we spent so many years thoroughly removing the commercialism and emphasizing the spiritual that now, without the spiritual, things seem a little strange.
Our weekly dinners to celebrate the various parts of the creche made the approach to Christmas an enjoyable thing and kept the entire season in focus. Each week in December we had a special dinner to represent various people and animals in the manger scene. Pasta was hay for the donkey. Dried fish and cheese and olives was Mary and Joseph’s road meal. A nice stew was the shepherd’s meal. A wonderful oriental meal was symbolic of the wise men. It was our favorite part of the season. Those meals were special, only made one night a year. We jokingly argued about which was our favorite. I suppose we could do something similar to that now, but why? To represent a story that I no longer believe happened? Even if it didn’t happen, I don’t believe in what the story represents, so I can’t even get metaphoric. We had many similar rituals and well-loved traditions, but they all stand for things that I no longer support.
Really, the first thing I need in order to enjoy Christmas as something more than an agenda item is a purpose. What is the mission statement for Christmas? What is the point?
It may seem trivial or silly to you reading, but you have to understand that for the first 20 years of my life Christmas was about consumption. It was about what you got. The next 20 years was about the spiritual aspects of Christmas. We worked hard to remove the commercial aspects and keep Christmas about Christ. Now, as a lefty anti-consumption atheist I can’t support either commercialism or Jesus. So focusing on gift giving is out, and focusing on Jesus is out.
I’m 41, and I have no idea what Christmas is really for.
Right now, I’m thinking that there are two reasons: celebrate the fact that the long cold winter in Manitoba is half over, and celebration of family. Either of those are a good reason to hold a month of special events. Both together, I think I can get behind. The thing is, now we need to create traditions and events and things to do at Christmas from scratch. We need to start from the beginning and design what we want Christmas to be about and how we want to celebrate family in the midst of Christmas(tm) all around us. I think I want there to be lots of singing and lots of food and lots of laughing. I want my five kids to all look at this year as a great Christmas. And it’s all going to be completely new.
As breaking new ground often is, it’s both exciting and terrifying. Into the wild blue yonder…
