If I try, I can remember the excitement I used to feel as we approached Christmas. Christmas Eve was almost unbearable. I'm not entirely certain how I managed to sleep, though whatever sleep I managed was for a very short time. My parents established a hard and fast rule about how early I could wake them, so I watched the sky gradually lighten at my curtained window until the time arrived.
The bounty always lay scattered like gemstones in a fantasy around the tree, soon enough piles of paper and ribbons and bows. Then came the befuddlement of trying to play with several toys simultaneously. Lunch and dinner were breaks I didn't want to take and suffered through the time I was required to sit at the table. Then back to the living room and the bubbling lights on the tree.
Once we started traveling to see my mother's family on Christmas morning, the true excitement moved to Christmas Eve. Once dinner was finished and the plates were dried and neatly stacked, we'd move to the living room, and I got to play Santa, distributing presents to my parents and-of course--to myself.
When I had children of my own, Christmas regained some of that shine, and I instituted the tradition of one of my sons handing around the presents, everyone waiting while each present was opened and admired.
Now my sons are full grown, and Christmas lacks mystery and wonder for me. My Jewish wife now gets excited at all the activity she missed out on for most of her life, but even that isn't enough to inspire me. I've been Rinzai Zen Buddhist for more than a dozen years, so Christmas has absolutely no religious significance to me. It's another time I get together with my sons and sometimes my step-children and grandson, though my wife's children usually have other plans. I see the purely mercantile face of the holiday, stripped of any real sense of wonder at something beyond gifts--wrapped up stuff.
Bah-humbug. Sometimes I think we need a little more Scrooge to balance out the gluttony and greed that run without restraint.
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1 comment:
There's only a few options, really: surrender, get co-opted, resist. Ignore is not really a possibility.
I've become more in the "resistance" camp, though it's easy to feel churlish and unreasonable when those close to you still have some connection to their own particular feelings for the season, whether only nostalgia, or something more deeply felt.
I saw Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping recently; a good friend from the writing program is part of the "Stop Shopping Choir". And I was really inspired by the idea of creating communitas as opposed to consumeritas. Visit someone. Make something. Meet a neighbor (I only vaguely know my neighbors here).
Andrea and I are going to some pagan friend's place in Brooklyn this afternoon. We're bringing pumpkin pie, but no presents...
I hope you're merry for your own good reasons right now.
G
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