Deconstructing Christmas
I'm humbug-adjacent.
I just finished a book.
I tried to write it once before, and even finished, though the result wasn’t very good. So I waited eight years, threw that first version out, and tried it again. It’s better this time. I’m starting to feel confident that, a couple drafts from now, it might turn into a good book.
This leaves me oddly rudderless, and right before Christmas. I’ve been holding Christmas at arm’s length the last few years, for reasons. I enjoy Christmas alright, and do all the requisite gift-giving, and I will even nod my head along to the occasional carol, and brave the occasional crowd. But it’s like the holiday is taking place in another room. I can hear it distantly, echoing in the hallway, but I’m not directly next to the din, unless I choose to be. I’ll travel to my daughter’s house on Christmas Day to share the day with her and her husband and my grandson and my wife. But we don’t decorate much. My wife is Jewish, we haven’t gathered many holiday traditions. Our presents are set under a lightly-decorated table instead of a tree.
Our Christmas table is a throwback to my parents, and my Mom in particular, who one year came up with the idea of a Christmas chair. I think this was a response to the ecology-minded 70s, and she didn’t want to kill a tree for Christmas. So she put lights and decorations around a very pretty old rocking chair she had refinished. They set all the presents under the chair.
I didn’t live with my parents anymore, and was living in New York at the time. I came home one year and discovered the chair. My Mom taught me a valuable lesson that year: you can take the holiday, any holiday, and turn it into your own. Christmas is infinitely malleable.
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Let’s leap back a little over a decade to a St. Patrick’s Day in 2010 or 2011.
My daughters had both made leprechaun traps for the holiday, and placed them on top of the dinner table. The traps were cardboard boxes, covered in tin foil to attract the leprechauns (shiny!). A pencil propped the box partway open, and a quarter was under the pencil, so that when the greedy leprechauns tried to take the coin, the box would be on them.
After the kids fell asleep, I took all the dinner table chairs and balanced them on top of the table. Then I took the traps and balanced them on top of the chairs. Then I made a sign that said “Ha! Ha! Ha! Fooled you again!” and balanced it on top of the traps (I did a variation on this every year, the previous year I had turned all the furniture in the family room upside down.)
My fatal mistake? The sign was in my handwriting. My eldest recognized the script, and then all the dominoes started to fall. The leprechauns were Dad, and had been this whole time. Hmmm. What about the tooth fairy? What about the Easter Bunny?
What about Santa?
She asked me if Santa was real. I told her the truth, with the standard caveat that she shouldn’t tell any of her friends, or the kids at school, that Santa wasn’t real. In particular: don’t tell your sister.
Of course she told her sister. That same day. Her sister came to me the same day and I told her the truth, along with the standard caveat. She chose, a few days later, to continue to believe in Santa, and did all the Santa-pleasing activities on Christmas Eve like leaving out cookies for Santa and cat food for the reindeer. I’m not quite sure how that worked inside her head, how much of her belief was real and how much was pretend. An eight-year-old girl’s mind is an interesting place. She made Christmas her own.
She gave up on Santa the next year. Most of the kids at school had by that time discovered the truth.
My point is, you can pick and choose which parts of Christmas to hold close, and which parts to let go. If you like cookies, bake some Christmas cookies. If you enjoy church, go to church. If you don’t want to go up on the roof to hang lights, don’t. If you love to sing Christmas carols, go out and sing them to your neighbors. If you don’t want to participate at all, order a pizza on Christmas Day and play video games all day.
Christmas is hard. Even the most determined Christmas-philes have a few ambiguous memories or holiday disappointments they need to push into the corner (that might be what drives them to be Christmas-philes in the first place). Find that mental place, as my daughter did all those years ago, that allows you navigate the holiday with grace and sanity.
Make Christmas your own. There are no rules. You get to do whatever you want, within reason, of course. Be kind to yourself.
Peace.
