If I Get to Decide on the Fate of Christmas

It's over. And yet...

Every year my town pulls from storage a stack of wire decorations shaped like large holly sprigs, made of green and red lights, and attaches these to the electric poles. Someone hangs a wreath in every window of the courthouse, and the railings of the historic hotel are strung with fake pine boughs.

The town looks festive, especially at night: a festival is underway.

On Friday my county commissioner delivered hams to all the volunteers at the Archives. The board chair left a Claxton fruitcake for each of us. At the post office, long queues of people are mailing large boxes to family and friends, blinking hard at the price increases for parcel post. One of the rural carriers in nearby Baxley constructed a reindeer and sleigh using USPS boxes outside the p.o.

I say again, it’s a festive time. It’s imaginative, it’s uplifting, it’s generous.

We Americans really need celebration right now. Without it, we focus on the bad news, so much of it. We focus on lack, not abundance. We focus on the places our bodies hurt, rather than the places where our bodies are functioning beautifully, harmoniously, steadfastly. We focus on hurt feelings.

As much as I detest Christmas, I have been brought into its embrace, and I am glad that there are still children in the world, who can be brought to amazement by the wonders of the season—the mysteries, the gifts, the candy, the special foods, a tree in the house, the stories, the movies.

~*~

Let me bury, deep in this post, my reasons for detesting Christmas. There are five of them:

1. I was not allowed to celebrate it as a child. My very conservative father believed that it was “of the world,” not “of God.” Whatever the world was doing, he eschewed. For him, Christmas was pagan, designed for heathens. Therefore, because I have no childhood history with the holiday, I have no nostalgia for it, only ambivalence. For all my life I will look upon Christmas as an outsider.

2. You know how much of an environmentalist I am. It’s my life’s work to try to save some of life on earth. I am nauseated by waste, and waste takes many forms at Christmas:

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

3. I’ve been thinking of how much of the season falls to women. Women do the heavy lifting of the decorating, the gift-buying, the gift-wrapping, the gift-mailing, the cooking, the cleaning, the stocking-filling. This week my husband, Raven, picked a book for me off the new books shelf at the library. Called The No Club, the book wrestles with this problem: Women are burdened with non-promotable tasks. In the workplace women are the ones most often asked to do work that does not lead to rewards, including 1) help others do their work, 2) edit and proofread, 3) resolve conflicts, 4) plan special events, 5) train and mentor, 6) do office housework like making coffee, 7) do committee work, and 8) organize and coordinate (but not manage). Promotable tasks, on the other hand, include activities like researching, working with clients to rack up billable hours, and writing books to secure tenure.

4. Gifts are the love-language of some people. I know people who can give gifts when they can’t give intimacy, when they can’t give love, when they can’t give their heart.

5. As a postscript I’ll mention the alarming amounts of sugar we eat at Christmas.

Now I’ll be quiet about everything I detest.

~*~

I want to remind you that what we all want is very simple. It is to belong. You know this already. I know it so deeply that tears spring to my eyes as I write this sentence. Belonging is security, safety.

Not belonging is the cold hinterlands, the outer darkness, starvation; and in so many messages we are told that we don’t belong.

Each of us belongs to the great river of humanity. We belong to the earth. We belong to our ancestors.

We also want to belong to each other.

You belong. It’s not that you belong because you voted for Trump or you belong because you’re Southern Baptist or you belong because you’re white or straight or able-bodied.

The greatest gift we can give to each other is a sense of belonging, of having a family to belong to, a mission to belong to, friends to belong to, a workplace to belong to, a place to belong to. The biggest gift of all is a place at the table—no, let me rephrase that. The biggest gift of all is a warm, loving, arms-wide-open place at the table.

There is hardly a chance that Christmastime rolls around and we don’t, every one of us, in some sense or another, question our belonging. In so many ways the pain of not belonging is made clearest to us at this most poignant and beautiful of seasons. I’m not going to say much about my own circumstances, but in many ways this is my essential wound, and it has been on my mind this week, all the ways I don’t belong. I am determined not to focus on lack and warped places and holes.

This is why, no matter my reluctance, I have been enjoying the magic of holiday lights, the smell of cedar and pine, the yum of fruitcake, the glitter of foil, the ribbons and bows.

All of these mean that we are willing to create beauty and bounty for each other.

You know the idea of the commons. Something that is part of the commons is something that we all own—something that belongs to all of us in common. In so many ways, beauty and bounty during the winter holidays is part of the commons. The Christmas lights of my village have been erected for all to enjoy. They say to all of us, This belongs to you. You belong to this.

I am determined to enjoy that.

May we all know the depth of our belonging.