I am not Christian. I understand that a lot of people around the world celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday. Admittedly, I celebrated long after I realized I wasn’t Christian. Back when I decided to stop celebrating Christmas, I was still trying to achieve some sort of balance with certain factions of my blood relatives. They were very religious. It was an important holiday to them, and the secular celebration of it bothered them. I wanted to show some respect for their beliefs. I was planning to start a family of my own. I was trying to grasp what it was I was going to tell my child if I didn’t want to do the Jesus Christ’s birthday thing. I felt like it was more respectful of these relatives’ beliefs if I simply walked away from celebrating the holiday, rather than transforming it into a celebration of something that did fit into my world view better. In the intervening years I’ve gotten a far better picture of what those relatives, whose feelings I was worried about, really feel about me, and I am far less concerned now about trying to respect their beliefs. Still it did play a part in my decision.
There is also a little thing oft referred to as family politics, as if regular politics weren’t ugly enough.
My parents are divorced. They have been since I was very young. Where was I going for Christmas? Should I trade off every other year? Should I spend it with the one I wasn’t living with at the time? When I was a child they worked it out amongst themselves. If they argued about it, I was unaware or have blocked it out. I spent Christmas where I spent Christmas and probably got spoiled a little bit extra over the holidays because of it. I had fun with the people I was with. There were presents and twinkling lights, and a good many more sweets than I normally got to have. I missed the ones I wasn’t with. It was a “family holiday” and I was from a broken one.
By the time I hit adolescence, the presents and the sweets mattered less to me. I was very aware I wasn’t Christian, although I wasn’t ready to tell people that yet. Instead I was trying to come to terms with this “Spirit of Christmas” or “Magic of Christmas” thing that people would go on about. It wasn’t what I saw. What I saw, was that the people who understood me, the people that I wanted to spend time with, were all stuck in a house with their relatives, while I was stuck in a house with my relatives. Yes, I was at that age when my peer group was becoming a stronger influence, than my parents. That was only part of it. I had also started to become a lot more aware of the various dynamics in the relationships around me, and I could see that I was not the only one who was not brimming with joy at every familial interaction. I was seeing things in the marriages of my relatives. I was hearing the exasperated tones. I noticed that people who rarely had a drink of alcohol had one for the holidays and that it was more a matter of dulling their senses than celebration. You shoved all the extendeds into one house together for a week and things got… tense. A game of Pictionary could end with somebody in tears, and I don’t mean one of the children. Once I was old enough to drive I would escape to spend time with my friends as soon as I could get away.
When I met the person who would become my husband, it seemed inevitable that we would celebrate Christmas. We both always had. As we started to build our lives together we needed to sort out how we would celebrate the holiday as a family. As it happened, his parents divorced long ago too. So now we had 4 groups to choose from and no way to please everyone. It wasn’t just the basic 4 sets of our parents, we still had at least 1 grandparent living for each of those 4 parents.
The first year we put up our own tree, which was fun and exciting. We got it for 5 bucks and had a lot of fun decorating. My mother bought us several very nice ornaments which was a gesture I really appreciate. We didn’t go visit her since she didn’t live locally. We had our own gift exchange at home, and we made some rounds to see the local friends and relatives.
The next year my mother agreed to bring her family (both of my parents started new families after I was grown) to spend Christmas with us. I have to admit, this felt like a milestone. My mother and her family travelling to spend the holiday with us told me she believed I was a grown up, that she accepted my relationship, and knew I was really establishing my own household. It meant a lot to me. We got ourselves another 5 buck tree and decorated it. I planned my dinner menu (centered around a lamb roast). It would be our first Christmas that we were hosting. We also invited his mother and her husband. They said they would come. We did not invite my father over, who was also local. He had recently married a Buddhist they were still sorting out the Christmas thing. (I think now they celebrate it when they were spending it with my grandparents, and don’t otherwise, but I’m not certain. We have more interesting things to talk about.) This worked out better for us since we had a small apartment. On Christmas his mother didn’t call and didn’t show up. We waited a while and finally he called over to see when she’d be arriving, and she told him that she wasn’t feeling well.
The next day we found out she was pissed off and offended that we were arrogant enough to think we could host our own Christmas. She had not gotten to have her own Christmas until she was married and had a child, and her son should come to her house for Christmas. The fact we had out of town guests did not figure into it. They were my guests.
It became a bit of a thing, and she wouldn’t give us our gifts (including those by other people that were sent to her address) until we came to her house. At this point we were irritated and in the midst of a solidly petty and immature reaction ourselves, so we avoided going to her house completely. We’d meet for breakfast out at restaurants. It was many months until we ended up at and her house and got those gifts. Some were baked goods which were far from fresh at that point. Ghost of Christmas Past Shortbread Cookies, made with real butter and quite rancid.
The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, literally and figuratively. To top it off, between the general stress of the season and the overwhelming workload of college life, we left the tree up long beyond the point of no return. We had managed to put the ornaments away, but once you pass the time that the garbage people will collect it on trash day, it became an effort to get rid of it. We didn’t have a truck to take it to the dump ourselves, and we were expending a lot of effort in a lot of other areas of our lives. The needles dried and many fell. The tree began to look much like a giant sized Charlie Brown tree. It stood as a reminder. When we got rid of it (way before we got those gifts, mind you) we knew it would be our last real tree. Before the next Christmas came along we’d already gotten the rest of the way through our decision making process. That was the last Christmas that we celebrated. It wasn’t particularly terrible. There were plenty of good parts to it. There just wasn’t the sort of personal meaning I was looking for.
