My daughter's current favorite outfit is a red satin dress with a rhinestone belt and a little velvet jacket with white faux fur cuffs and collar; it's her "Santa outfit" and she always completes it with a Santa hat. She rarely wears clothes in the house, but this outfit remained on her all day; she even insisted on wearing it to preschool, where her giggling non-Christian classmates ran up to her and bemoaned not having worn their Halloween costumes too. And she danced in it tonight, eating Christmas cookies and twirling, bathed in the multi-colored lights of the tree.
Christmas used to be my favorite holiday: the music, the lights, the ornaments, the brightly wrapped presents, the Christmas movies and specials on TV, the parties, the time off school, the (one hoped) snow and Santa, oh boy, Santa. There was no work, just fun, and everything was glittering and shimmering and glowing, including me, to the very core.
Christmas started to take on tarnish when my parents told me there was no real Santa, that they were the ones putting presents under the tree and I now faced conscription into the ranks of the present wrappers. (But shh! Don't tell your brother.) Then it became more difficult to pick out all the obligatory presents for all the countless people I had to buy for, and the number of people I was obliged to buy presents for kept growing. And there was the tree to be purchased and decorated and then undecorated and disposed of. (And all those years of living in apartments, this was a very complicated thing. I'd cut the branches off and sneak them out to the trash dumpster -- which was not to be used for Christmas trees, although no alternative was ever presented -- in large plastic trash bags, like a murderer disposing of the body.)
I wasn't the child, wide eyed, face pressed to a frosty window looking for the glow of Rudolph's nose, I was slave labor in Santa's workshop. I was a cog in the grinding wheels of the enormous commercial juggernaut. How disappointing to find that magic doesn't just come raining down in fairy dust, it's a meticulously created illusion involving countless hours of preparation and planning.
That, you will say, is when one should focus on the true meaning of Christmas: celebrating the birth of Christ. But what Christian faith I ever possessed was gone from my life before even Santa's disappearance from reality. Christmas, for as long as I've celebrated it independently, has been a combination of cultural holiday and family obligation, leaving me in a perpetual state of existential yuletide crisis. Remove from Christmas both Christ and the magic of a man who can visit every Christian household on the globe in one night, add the expectation that the fantastic illusion of magic must be maintained, and what do you have left but perfectionist stress and soulless consumerism?
So, last year, on Christmas Eve, my husband and I were huddled in bed crying (yes, crying!). We were so stressed about the disappointment our children were sure to encounter in the morning. All that excitement, all that hype, all that promise from the culture at large that (in a booming announcer's voice) "ALL WISHES WILL BE FULFILLED ON CHRISTMAS!" We were sure to fail. And when that thought fully sunk in, "we were sure to fail," I felt better. The best I can ever hope to do on Christmas is, through tireless effort, to fall a little less short than usual of a wildly unrealistic set of expectations. Christmas is a fantasy, and like all fantasies, it ends in disappointment.
So, screw it. Screw the big fantasy. Screw mourning for what isn't. Screw the guilt over not being Christian. Why do I do Christmas? Because that tree looks pretty with lights on it. Because I have an ornament that my grandmother brought with her from Europe to her new life in America, and one my mom and I made together, and one my childhood best friend's grandmother handmade out of beads. Because I like Christmas music. Because that crazy ass Heat Miser/Snow Miser special rocks. Because it gives me an excuse to read David Sedaris's essay "Six to Eight Black Men." Because I get to watch my very favorite movie in the world, It's a Wonderful Life on the big screen in the local movie theater. Because my kids have fun ripping wrapping paper. Because I like reading Dickens aloud. Because my daughter likes dancing in her Santa outfit. Because it's fun to see things all glittery, including me, in the winter darkness. And that's all good enough this time around.
And for edubs, who had to ask me who Heat Miser was, a little video for your edification:
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