A Few Thoughts on What Christamas Means to Me

A couple of days ago I once again watched my favorite version of Dickens’s,  A Christmas Carol. The musical one starring Albert Finney. I think the makers of the film hit all the notes just right.

You might not know it, but many scholars credit that short novel published in 1843 as the beginning of the modern notion of Christmas.  It wasn’t that he created new ideas the way that the 1823, poem Twas the Night Before Christmas did,  but it popularized the idea that Christmas was largely a secular holiday of goodwill, generosity, family, and festivities.

The holiday we now celebrate as Christmas is very, very old. Perhaps as old as humanity, particularly in north west Europe where the winters are long and harsh. Of course, thousands of years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in the far-off eastern Mediterranean, his birth was not “the reason for the season”, but rather the winter solstice, the longest darkest night of the year for my Germanic ancestors for whom the cold and dark was the harbinger of death.  The celebration of the end of shortening days and the promise of rebirth in the spring was the reason for the celebration with friends and family with the Yule Log, the fir tree in the home, mistletoe, and all the rest predates all recorded history. 

Culture is a funny thing, in that it can be suppressed for centuries, yet it does not go away. As the Germanic influence spread to the south and east in the first millennium, so did the notion of the solstice celebration. So much so that it had to be countered by the growing Catholic Church. As those maniacal megalomaniacs who led the quazi-political organization has done for over a thousand years, rather than try to suppress the “pagan” celebration, they simply coopted the solstice and decreed that it was actually a Christian tradition.  It has always been a lie that the “reason for the season” is the birth of Christ. But the truth has always been an impediment to religious absolutists, so this is part of a pattern, not an aberration.  

While the Christianization of the solstice was highly successful in Southern Europe, it was never complete in places where the Germanic languages prevailed (i.e. the English-speaking world).  So it is no surprise that the modern version of Christmas was founded in the Germanic and Anglophile cultures. It is not a coincidence that manufactured toys only became a factor in Christmas celebrations in Germanic and English-speaking countries in the same era as Twas the Night Before Christmas and A Christmas Carol.  However, throughout the Victorian era, the secular version of Christmas was limited to northern Europe, North America, and the British Empire.

The global cataclysms of the first half of the 20th Century had the side effect of, for the first time ever, creating a global culture. It just so happened that after WW2, American culture became the defacto global culture.  For instance, the 1931Coca-Cola version of Santa Claus is now the global vision of Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created in 1939 by Chicago-based retailer Montgomery Wards.

Despite the ongoing efforts of religious conservatives to propitiate the lie that “Christmas” is mostly a religious holiday, ” it began as a family/social holiday and still is for most people across the globe. My evolving version of Christmas reflects the modern version that the holiday season is first about family and friends with only a nod to religious affiliation. As a child in the 1960’s my family did go to church every Sunday and I was taught the nativity story, but even then it was a side-line, not the main event of Christmas.

Me, my brother and sister, circa Christmas 1968

As a child in Houston and then in suburban Dallas Christmas was all about family and the big Christmas tree.  We would visit both sets of my grandparents either in the days before or right after Christmas morning.  Christmas at Mamaw & PaPaw’s was wonderful and predictable.  They had their white flocked tree with a sleigh and reindeer set among the presents that we loved to play with. Mamaw made enough food to feed an army and it was a scene right out of a Norman Rockwell painting with the long table loaded with the turkey and food from end to end.  As a child, I simply took all of this for granted. It was the way Christmas was supposed to be.  

Around 1974, both sets of my grandparents and my family (my dad took the photo)

 At the family get-together at “Pop’s” house I saw all my cousins but with all the time the grown-ups spent talking it seemed to drag on forever.  Pops, my father’s father, was a master woodworker, so each of us kids were given handmade toys.  I cringe to recall that at seven years old, I thought the hand-made toys were second-rate to the plastic junk I really wanted. How I wish I had some of those crafted masterpieces now.  

The main event was gathering around the tree on Christmas morning. Each year my brother and I were confined to our room at 7:00 PM and we listened to the Santa sighting reports until we went to sleep. Our living room had been decorated since the first of December, but the best gifts only showed up overnight after being delivered by Santa Claus. Since Santa always brought my mother a new nightgown/negligee, we kids had to wait till Mom put it on, and did her hair and makeup before we could start opening presents.  

sometime in the last 60's

Dad was the emcee and handed out gifts that we opened one at a time. It was quite a production.  And, as our family was the prototypical American post-war baby boomers. The “Christmas haul” was bountiful.  We always had both toys and … uggg… clothes.  Christmas morning was mostly about playing with our new toys. I have a distinct memory from about 1974 putting on my new, blue rollerskates. Not the old-style steel-wheeled clip-on skates but shoe skates with clay wheels like the ones we wore at the roller rink.  Racing up and down the street (in short pants) took up the majority of the day for me.

early 1970's

Less clear in my mind was the Christmas in about 1967 when I got my first real bicycle… the cool kind with a sissy bar in the back and racing slick tires. Another Chrismas tradition for our family was the Playboy Christmas issue or calendar (or both) in Dad's stocking.

Circa 1972

I had no idea how idyllic my Christmas’s were. I just assumed all kids had the same experiences. And perhaps that is the way it should be. I was oblivious to the harsh realities for kids who did not live in the homes of the professional American middle-class. But looking back, I realize that the joy of Christmas was not the toys, but the security and love of family and community.  I lived in a bubble that actually saw my life as exactly like what I saw on The Brady Bunch, though I had no idea it was the exception rather than the rule, even in the USA of the 60’s & 70’s.

Circa mid-70's. I'm the one in the middel

I My second vision of Christmas began as I was training for Christian ministry/social work in the inner city of Chicago. Even so, it took several years for me to realize that what I saw in both the Northside and the Southside homes I visited was the norm for American kids, not the world I’d grown up in. By the time I left Chicago in 1986, I had a new appreciation for the life I’d been given as a child.

As financially strapped newlyweds, right out of my undergrad, Paula and I first had a tree so small that we put it on top of the package that held the jewelry box I’d bought her rather than under it.   Money was tight, not just that year, but for most of my kid’s childhood. It took me almost 20 years to earn as a minister/social worker as much as I’d made as a bellman at Chicago’s Palmer House. I recall one year, when our daughter was very young, how Paula cried because she’d thought we’d have the money to provide for our own children the kind of Christmas she remembered. As a young parent, I very much wanted my kids to have what I’d had, but with my choice to spend my life trying to save the world rather than make money, it was just not possible. Yet looking back, those Christmases were wonderful with more hugs than gifts.

Our second Christmas together

Perhaps the highlight was the Christmas when our kids were three and five years old.  I worked with teens in Indiana. Someone must have told them how little I made and … well it was true. We had almost nothing for presents for the kids, but the teenagers I worked with took it upon themselves to ensure my two children had a Christmas to remember.  Even as I write this, I can’t keep the tears from my eyes thinking about what those kids did for me and mine that year.  Of course, it was not the gifts that piled under our tree, but the fact that the teens, on their own, chose to do that for us.

Christmas 1996

It was only when our kids were teens, after I took a job with the local public school district to run their social work program (and Paula was working full-time for Victoria’s Secret), that we were able to provide our kids with the kind of Christmas we’d enjoyed as children. For five or six years I spent Christmas Eve arranging the kids Christmas presents in just the right way so that when they came up the stairs in the morning, they would get what I remember as “the Christmas morning experience.” It normally took over an hour to get everything just right. My dear wife thought I was silly for doing it, but it was important to me. Looking back, I’m very glad I did.

Circa 2007

Finally, I moved into the third stage of Christmas where the kids are grown and gone. In some ways Christmas all but disappeared from our home.  We didn’t even put up a tree for something like five years as we went to our kid's homes for Christmas celebrations.  But even so, it was still about family even if there were no decorations in the home in which my kids spent most of their childhood.

This year, things seem more normal with the tree up and packages waiting for Christmas morning (tomorrow).  I guess it has been the cataclysms of the past year that brought the realization that each and every Christmas I am still alive to enjoy has made me consider the meaning of Christmas for me personally.   Last night, Paula and I again watched Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It was hard not to take the story very personally as the film made the point that a well-lived life is reward enough. Just because I haven’t changed the world does not mean I have not made my time on earth worth while.

So, I offer all of my readers wishes for a very Happy Christmas with friends and family.

...and hope you forgive my trip down memory lane