Christmas

There have been times in the past when I have not much liked Christmas.

I don't have religion, and therefore don't share in the celebration of Christ's birthday at the heart of the religious festival.

Also, some of the trappings of Christmas drive me crazy. Our culture blows a gasket at this time of year. Media seems to scream at us to show how much we love people by buying them expensive gifts, Boxing Day sales now begin before Christmas, huge crowds of impatient and desperate people vie for that last Cabbage Patch doll or whatever 'it' happens to be that year. In addition to being unnecessarily wasteful, the Christmas lights that people put up on the outside of their houses are often gaudy and entirely tasteless. Not only that, people now put up their lights just after Hallowe'en, and take them down at the end of January.

However, this last Christmas I changed my mind. There are some things about Christmas that I really do like. And we should try, whenever possible, and as the song says, to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Christmas is no exception.

It is a time when all of us in our family take time off school and work to be together. We play games, watch movies, make and eat meals, and go for walks and bike rides. We try to get together with extended family, and sometimes this is the only time of year I get to see some relatives. Remember what Einstein told us: 'Whenever we are around relatives, time slows down', or something like that. It is a time to take stock, relax, have some laughs, and tell and listen to all the old family stories.

Christmas is celebrated just after the winter solstice, when we experience the least amount of daylight hours in our yearly cycle. Up here on the 50th degree of latitute, we get down to about 6 or 7 hours of daylight on the 21st of December. A return of daylight to a dark and cold world is a very fitting thing to celebrate. It is inded a time of hope.

I like getting Christmas trees and hanging ornaments on them. When the kids were little, we would head off into the forest and cut down our own tree. More recently we have bought our tree at a mall, and in the last two years we have used an artificial tree I bought at a garage sale for 10 bucks. On one holiday to California, we used a Superstore plastic box propped up in the corner of the hotel room as a tree, and it worked great. It does not seem to matter what the tree is made of. At Christmas, it seems to be enough that one part of the living room takes on a new focus, and that it is covered in ornaments that we have collected over the kids' lives. A tree represents one of the 'ritual' activities of this holiday, and I like it.

While I don't really appreciate the lyrics of Christmas songs perhaps as a Christian might, I really like the melodies of all those old songs, especially the jazz covers of them. Throughout the Christmas period, our stereo blasts out Christmas carols, and every year I look forward to hearing the Dave Brubeck quartet play 'Santa Claus is coming to town'.

I like the idea of giving gifts to people. It is something very different from a birthday present, the only other time most people give and accept gifts. We give people gifts, they put them under their tree, and the expectation and suspense builds until the actual act of everyone sitting around the tree and opening presents. While I loath the consumerism built around the edges, the actual ritual of giving gifts is a really great thing about Christmas.

What strikes me is that all of the things that I like about Christmas are not originally Christian. The holiday just after the winter solstice when we celebrate the return of light, that includes a tree covered in ornaments, the singing of songs, and giving gifts, all pre-date Christianity by perhaps millennia.