Christmas Belonged to Everyone Else
With a special audio edition of this Christmas story.
The first I knew of Christmas I was three, visiting my grandmother. She lived only eight miles from us, and my parents saw her often.
This visit, something was wildly different.
In her living room my grandmother had constructed a tree. It was, unlike most trees, solid white. It stood in the room, grand and stunning, its white branches hung with blue balls and silver strands. The tree was spangled with lights. Tiny light bulbs—not clear but colored red and green and blue—blinked on and off in ripples of color up and down the limbs.
I had glimpsed wondrous trees such as this through plate-glass windows of houses we drove past. I had seen them in stores.
I had never seen such a thing up close.
I stood in front of this beautiful, sparkling tree, mesmerized, unable to think. Manners were more important to my parents than wonder, and soon my mother, who was carrying a baby and holding the hand of a toddler, reminded me that my job was to behave. “Come sit down,” she said, and I knew by her tone that she was talking to me.
I sat on my grandmother’s sofa, beside my mother, my eyes glued to the extravaganza of a shimmering, bedazzling tree. Although I stared and stared at it, I could not understand why it had suddenly appeared inside my grandmother’s home. And what did it all mean?
As the Years Passed
On Sunday drives I came to understand that during one particular season of the year, the world turned to glow and glitter.
People brought a tree inside, set it up in front of a window, and draped it with garlands. They hung wreaths on doors and tied red ribbons on mailboxes and outlined houses with lights. Special songs played in stores and on the radio.
By the time I was in second grade, I knew that this season was Christmas. It was a holiday. A white-bearded guy called Santa Claus came down your chimney and left presents for you under your Christmas tree.
“What if you don’t have a Christmas tree?” I asked a child at school.
She looked puzzled. “You don’t have one?”
“No.”
“He’ll leave your presents somewhere else.” She was certain of this. She told me to look everywhere on Christmas morning since Santa wouldn’t know where to leave the gifts. Who knew where he would leave them.
Santa did not leave presents.
I asked Daddy why. Why why why why why?
“There’s no such thing as Santy Claus,” he said. “That’s just a story people make up to tell children. People say Jesus was born on Dec. 25. That’s Christmas Day. But Jesus was not born on Dec. 25. People have it all wrong. They don’t care when Jesus was born because they’re celebrating what they’re gonna get for Christmas. They’re thinking about bows and ribbons.”
A little bit of hope died in me. I couldn’t say this then, but I can say it now. Damn Santa Claus. Damn Christmas.
Christmas belonged to everyone else, but it didn’t belong to me.
Making a List
By the time I was in third grade I had identified the worst day of the year. It was Jan. 2, the first day back to school following Christmas break. All the kids went around bragging about what Santa Claus brought them—bicycles and Barbie dolls and pop guns and cowboy boots and go-go boots and hula hoops and batons and basketballs.
That was the year I started coming up with invisible gifts. I couldn’t outright lie and say I got an Easy Bake oven when I had not. However, I had recently gotten a new box of crayons. I had new socks, a fairly new pair of shoes. When at recess the kids gathered around the monkey bars for Christmas talk, I didn’t have to look ridiculous. A big box of crayons. Socks. Tennis shoes.
“Is that all?” Lisa asked.
"No! I got lots more than that.” Underwear, a pen, peppermint sticks, chocolate-covered cherries.
The following Christmas I didn’t wait until Jan. 2 to make my list. I wrote it all down beforehand. I was going to be prepared.
And I was. More socks. More crayons. Coloring books. A glitter pen. More chocolate-covered cherries.
The Tree in the Woods
When I was about eleven, I planned an elaborate and secret Christmas for my two younger brothers.
I was allowed free run of our ten-acre junkyard, and on the far side of a small pond lay a pine wood. The wood had been logged and replanted in the past—now the trees were twenty-five feet tall and too close together. Their crowns tangled, blocking out sunlight and making the small wood a dim and gloomy place. Sienna-colored pine needles accumulated six inches deep on the ground.
The wood was quiet. It was not crowded with junked cars. It was far from the house, a part of the junkyard my father never visited. I could move silently and freely there.
In this wood I came upon a small cedar. Near it was a large pine stump covered with soft green moss. The stump had two or three indentations in its face—small, moss-lined bowls.
Back at home I began two gifts. My brother Dell loved pretending to be a soldier from the Wild West, and I started making a wooden sword for him. I sawed one end of a stake into a point and sanded it down, then tied a crosspiece to it.
For my younger brother Steve I made a cardboard blowgun that used corks. It was something I saw in a craft book from the library.
This took a couple of days. Now Christmas Break had begun.
One evening I popped popcorn and strung it into a chain with needle and thread, as Laura Ingalls Wilder had done. Mama wanted to know what I was doing, so I told her. “I’m making a popcorn chain.”
“I hope you’re going to eat it once you string it up,” she said. “Because that’s wasting food.”
She didn’t think too much about it. I was always engaged in some project or other.
I cut a few small ornaments out of paper, colored them, and tied them with short loops of twine. From somewhere I collected pieces of candy. Secreted in my room, I cut a grocery bag flat, and I wrapped the gifts with brown Kraft paper.
One afternoon I packed a secret bag and left the house, circled the old pond, and traced my way to the cedar. There, alone in the dark wood, I decorated my first Christmas tree.
I felt guilty and scared as hell.
I went back for my brothers. I swore them to secrecy and brought them to the tree. There, in a dark and gloomy wood in the depths of a junkyard that still exists in the south of Georgia, three children born to a fundamentalist dad who didn’t believe in Christmas had a little Christmas.
That was the single Christmas of my childhood.
For some strange reason, probably to feed the animals, I left pools of dried corn in the bowls of the stump. When I returned to the Christmas tree a few days later, the corn was gone—eaten—and the popcorn had been been stripped from the chains—also eaten.
That was a consolation.
Naturally
I have ambivalent feelings about Christmas.
Impact on the Earth
When I became an adult, I concluded that Christmas didn’t make much sense. I had become a raging environmentalist, and Christmas was an environmental nightmare. Last year I made a list of the ways Christmas is wasteful, and I’m sharing them again.
emphasis on consumption
overconsumption
excessive amounts of gifts
cheap, throwaway, poorly made gifts
unwanted gifts
gifts purchased without checking with recipients
gifts that will never be used
plastic gift-wrap
wrapping paper made from freshly logged trees (non-recycled)
millions of slain Christmas trees
plastic trees
fossil fuel for excessive flights
fossil fuel for excessive lights
I wrote about this a year ago in a post titled, “If I Get to Decide on the Fate of Christmas” (it’s going to get cancelled.)
Even So
In the years of my life I have experienced joyful moments of holiday love and unity and cheer. I have been moved to tears at Christmas Mass. I’ve seen a child dressed in white coming down a flight of stairs with candles burning in a wreath on her head, celebrating St. Lucia’s Day. I have sung along at community Christmas concerts.
This year is no exception. Last night we held a Solstice Fire with friends. A crockpot kept spinach artichoke dip warm and another heated lentil soup. A picnic table was laden with Christmas cookies. Overhead, an almost full moon tracked its course across the Milky Way. Burning chinaberry wood popped and sputtered, shooting sparks into the night.
To You
Happy St. Lucia Day. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Winter Solstice and Solar New Year. A Joyful Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas. Happy St. Stephens Day. Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Boxing Day.
Make Your Life Go Well
During this turn of the earth, I wish you the ability to make your life go well.
This is an idea I learned from Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap. Hendricks is not talking about your life occasionally going well. As he writes, we have the ability to make our life go well ALL THE TIME, no matter what befalls us. It makes sense. A good life is a matter of mindset.
Strangely, many of us carry limiting beliefs from childhood about how much fun we can have, how much money we can earn, how much love we can accept, how much creativity we can generate. When good things happen, sometimes we can’t believe it, and often we sabotage it. When too much good happens, we crank things back down to manageable.
What Hendricks means is training yourself to allow yourself longer and longer periods of feeling good.
I’ve been making a practice of this for a couple of months now. A few times I have slipped into “poor me” and “life is hard” and “tough times.”
To tell you the truth, I’m shocked by how well life can go. By far the majority of my life for two months now has gone really well. Mindblowingly well.
For my sake, think about it. Is your life going well right this minute? What can you do to make today go well? Can you wake up tomorrow morning and say to yourself, “My job is to make my life go well ALL THE TIME.”
This Post, For Example
I wanted to write this post and focus on how dismal Christmas can make me feel. Not having celebrated it as a kid, Christmas makes me feel as if I have a handicap. A Christmas disability. Gift-giving is weird. Our family is far-flung, in all kinds of ways. I don’t have time to spend decorating the house. I haven’t baked Christmas cookies. I feel unprepared and guilty about it all.
But to make my life go well through this season too, all I have to do is remember the glitter, the wonder, the delight, the singing, the eggnog, the dazzle and dream of it all.
That tiny shift. That’s all it takes.
And
I have one more wish for the new solar year. My hope is that we, as human beings, begin to study peace, to make a true study of peace the way we study war—a Citadel of peacemaking. And that we scholars of peace conclude that war is a terrible option.
Journey in Place Update
Many of you have registered for our upcoming Journey in Place course. I am deep into building a course of study that will enrich all our lives.
Thank you so much for registering. I’m grateful for your belief in my as your guide and for your desire to have a deeper relationship with the natural world. Thank you for taking your place on earth. It needs you.
I need you too.
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How we experience holidays as adults so often is a result of how our families celebrated or not those holidays when we were children. My mother loved Christmas. Her mother died when she was nine years old, and her father remarried quickly adding a stepmother and two step brothers to my mother’s world. My Mom had a difficult relationship with her father, and later she explained some of the details of why she departed home on the morning of her sixteenth birthday. She moved into a spare room with Aunt Liz and Uncle Joe her mother’s sister and her husband. Her father did not speak to her for years and would walk past her on a downtown street without acknowledging her. After I was born as her father’s first grandson, did her father arrive one day to take his grandson for a walk. My mother graciously treated that event as if years had not past since they had last spoken.
At her final Christmas when she was fifteen, she had received a Christmas stocking full of coal while her step brothers received numerous gifts. This event colored her future Christmas celebrations when she married and had her own children. I recall hearing last night arguments about department store charge account balances being discussed when I was supposed to be in bed long asleep.
My father would say that he did not intend to be paying off Christmas gifts in June of the following year. My mother would listen quietly and tell him that she would get a part time job - which she did at a local dentist’s office - so that her kids would always remember their Christmases fondly. I do.
She made sure that all the relatives had a carefully gift wrapped present awaiting them if they stopped by our house on Christmas day. Years later, when her father and his wife made it a point to stop by on Christmas day, my mother would hug them both, and then hand them the gifts that she had carefully selected earlier during the year. Christmas was a special day for Beverly F. Dwyer. She has been dead a long time, and on Christmas especially, I miss her laughter.
thanking god for the fragrance of new-mown hay, the beautiful silence of animals, and the absolute truth of the heavenly earth.
E.E. Cummings
Thank you, Janisse, for all the gifts you freely offer.