For the last couple of years, around the holidays, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what, exactly, Christmas is—like, beyond religious/Pagan/consumerist trappings. What IS it? Last year, I tried reading some books that I thought might help: Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Edward Gorey’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, and A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. All great, but not especially enlightening re: the meaning of Christmas.
This year, as co-host on the Dr. Kimcast (did I mention that literally my entire life is podcasts?), we’ve been taking a look at Christmas from a bunch of different angles. Recently for that show, I interviewed a bunch of adults about their Christmas traditions (episode forthcoming) and it was, in a word, heartbreaking. I don’t typically sit around talking to people about their feels about the holiday. So, I guess I just assumed that other adults also had warm fuzzies about Christmas. The reality I encountered was way different: the general consensus among my interviewees was that Christmas is kind of a pain—that, as a kid, sure, it was fun, but as an adult, the objective is to minimize holiday effort as much as possible, and that they didn’t get that much joy out of it. There was also the sentiment that Christmas is for kids and that without them around, there isn’t much of a point to it. ( To be fair, I suspect that a lot of what I heard clearly came from pandemic fatigue—people weary of worrying about gatherings and deciding instead not to travel and to enjoy a Netflix and pie situation.)
After the interviews, I felt kind of crushed. And also, kind of frustrated. It was that same feeling I get when there is something clearly fun happening and the people around me won’t join in. Or when someone says how awful/dumb/ humanity is—this always makes me feel sort of aghast and appalled and like I want to scream, “HAVE YOU NEVER SEEN STAR WARS OR HARRY POTTER OR ANY SPIELBERG MOVIE?? CLEARLY HUMANITY IS PROBLEMATIC BUT AT ITS CORE IT IS WORTH SAVING!! WE CANNOT GIVE UP! THIS IS HOW THE BAD GUYS WIN! GAAAAAH!” (I have actually said these words to someone.) That’s very close to how I felt after conducting those interviews.
The reason I’ve been doing all of this thinking about the meaning of this holiday in my life is because I love it. Or at least I want to love it again. And to be honest, finding what there is to love about it has become kind of a moving target .
To explain, here’s a Tiny History of Christmas for me:
There was a window of time when I was a kid before everything, for all kinds of reasons, began to go sideways in my family. Everyone was still alive and more or less in the same place geographically. There was a tacit agreement about what it meant to be a family and moreover, that we were one. I try not to idealize this time as some kind of Golden Era—I realize that so much of my experience of that window of time had to do with a kid’s obliviousness to the myriad adult issues that were surely going on. I’m also aware that my near-pathological escapism into TV and movies was probably an indicator that there were things from which to escape.
Caveats notwithstanding, there was a formative chunk of time when I was kid when I experienced my family as a whole, functioning thing. And within that time, Christmas was off. The muthafuckin. Chain. A few vignettes to give you an idea:
Decorating the Christmas tree, the whole family, while listening to an LP of singalong Christmas music from the 50s or 60s on which an announcer guy kept interrupting to say, “And now, in Italian!” “And now, in German!” All of us laughing at who the possible target audience was for this album as we decorated the tree with ornaments that had been in our family for generations.
My brother and I waking up at the ass crack of dawn, plotting in our PJs about our tactical approach to waking up the parents.
The Christmas I desperately wanted a red jam box for some reason (I’d probably seen it in a movie or something) and I opened all of my presents from Santa but no jam box did appear. And then, just like in A Christmas Story, my dad said, “What’s that over there? Behind that piece of furniture?” And just like Ralphie, I slowly approached and found a present hidden. And lo, it was indeed the red jam box. I almost died of glee.
Christmas light drives through the rich neighborhoods with the good lights, our immediate family, grandparents, aunts, and cousins all packed into the family station wagon, singing along with Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters.
Doing the grandparent circuit—we had three sets, as my mom’s parents had divorced and remarried—beginning with two magically decorated grandparent houses in our city with cookies and mashed potatoes and presents on Christmas Eve, and followed by a post-Santa visit to see the country grandparents on Christmas Day which involved literally going over a river and through the woods.
I could go on, but I think that’s enough to give you an idea of how high the Christmas bar was set during my childhood. [Insert some saying about how reaching a high point sets you up for a long, hard fall here.] To sum up what happened next: in my early teens some truly intense things started brewing in the family. I grew up, moved out, things intensified further, people passed away, the highly unusual circumstances in our family + garden variety events like people moving away for college meant that the family unit, like particles in a centrifuge, slowly but surely flew apart. What we became no longer bears any resemblance to the original model—and that includes our Christmasing, which we all do largely in our separate corners of the country.
I spent a lot of years—decades, even—as an adult in various stages of trying to carry on the family MegaChristmas in my own way, and mourning the loss of it. The thing I realize now (and maybe this is true for others) is that the decline of Christmas in my life has become a sort of focused symbol—a symbol of the fracturing and then breaking apart of my family, of the ravages that the passing of time brings to things that once seemed solid and stable. It’s become an annual reminder of how far we’ve fallen, of loss, of personal rejection. And then of course there’s the guilt of feeling these things while realizing my own relative privilege (Most people never get the kinds of Christmas I had! I have food, shelter, love, and presents! How can I even be upset?! I should be grateful….et cetera, et cetera.). So many feels on one holiday! Christmas is like a funhouse mirror held up to devastation that depicts said devastation sparkly lights and red, green, and white cheer around it.
But here’s the thing: Despite the pain and tears, I still love it and believe in it and can’t stop won’t stop celebrating it. Every year, I bring the Christmas, and I drag everyone else’s reluctant asses into celebrating it with me. (Exhibit A, this video that I wrote and directed my radio station coworkers to make with me years ago.)
A) It would never occur to me not to celebrate Christmas, and B) the idea of not celebrating it feels like it would be a sort of giving up on something important. So for the last couple of years, like I mentioned, I’ve been doing a new thing: trying to figure out what this holiday is for me, and what I want for it to be.
So when Kim (also a die-hard Christmas elf) and I started peeking under the Christmas hood on the Dr. Kimcast, I was into it. Yes! I thought, Let’s deconstruct this, get to the core of it. And she said something in one of our conversations that keeps resounding in my head: As we were talking about how families, and therefore holidays, morph over time, she said that the thing that remains, and that’s truly important, is the meaning they leave behind. People die, things change, but the meaning behind the important things and people and memories—that’s what endures. And so figuring out for ourselves what the meaning is behind bygone traditions and finding new ways to represent that meaning in our own here and now is what it’s all about. More than that, this forward-thinking approach (as opposed to the mopey, backward-gazing one that I’ve been using up until now) gives us the freedom and agency to do what brings that meaning for us, here and now, and to let go of things that stood in for the symbol before. It was one of those moments for me when I felt the little cogs in my brain click into place.
Our conversation gave my search for Christmas a prime directive: find the meaning, find the answer (also, “find the cheerleader, save the world”). And while I’ve still got a lot of thinking to do, I have come to a conclusion or two about what the holiday means for me and why it’s so important to me to keep celebrating it.
It goes back to that feeling I talked about near the beginning of this piece when I was talking about our reluctant interviewees—that feeling I had while talking to them where I wanted to yell, “WE CANNOT GIVE UP! THIS IS HOW THE BAD GUYS WIN! GAAAAAH!” And just…bear with me while I say some abundantly cheesy things. I think that for me, Christmas is symbolic of our better angels. There’s something about the day that compels us to spend money on, and wrap presents for, each other, to remember to care about those around us—even strangers. For some reason at this time of year, we generally pause our regularly scheduled program of me-focused living. We feed the homeless that day, we put up sparkly lights and decorate trees in our windows for our neighbors to see, we travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles, inconveniencing ourselves like crazy, just to be with people we love.
A day that reminds droves of people to do those things is well worth not giving up on. Maybe it’s a little dramatic to say, but for me, that would be sort of like giving up on humanity. So I’m going to continue to celebrate the hell out of it.
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How about you? What’s your Christmas story? I want to hear it! Drop me a line using our submission form over on the website or leave me a voice message on Speakpipe.
And whatever you do, I hope you have yourselves a merry little Christmas.