The Holidaze, Part 3: Grasping the Obvious
Dec 3rd, 2011 by Kimberly
The holiday season continues, and you’ve managed to get this far without strangling yourself with silver and gold ribbon. Congratulations. (Easy for some of us who have put off wrapping anything.) Yet you suspect there is supposed to be more to the season than just surviving it. How do you find something substantial out of these weeks, something that will stay with you after New Year’s Day?
Let’s begin with a confession. I am not much of a seamstress. (I know what you’re thinking: “Focus, Kimberly.” It relates, really.) It’s okay, I have other talents. I can live with it. My clothing, however, occasionally protests. Buttons fall off. Hems come undone. Small holes appear in the seams. I have tried sitting down with the offending item and explaining to it in a calm, reasonable tone of voice that it really needs to pull itself together, because I was created to do other things and I have a very limited clothing budget (try non-existent). It just sits there. With great reluctance, I hang the garment on the towel rack in the bathroom, where I can’t ignore it, so that eventually I will have to use my limited skills to make the necessary repairs. Then, the same thing always happens.
I ignore it.
It’s amazing. I hang it in an obvious spot, so that I will have to see it on a regular basis, but somehow the very fact that it’s so visible means that in an alarmingly short period of time, I stop seeing it altogether.
When I get all stressed out about the holidays, the same thing happens. Fundamental truths seem to blend in with the Christmas card lists and the wrapping paper until I forget that they’re even there. If I stop for a minute – maybe even an hour – and concentrate, though, those truths can change the way I see everything else. Now that we’ve taken the time to remember to embrace the new and make the list of what we want from the holidays, it’s time for:
Step Three: Pay Attention to the Obvious
Allow me to remind you of a few things you may have forgotten while standing in that line at the post office, wondering if the rest of the world still exists.
You care about these people.
While you’re stewing about what to buy Cousin Sue (the one who has returned every gift ever given her) and puzzling through how to fit sixteen guests around your eight-person dining room table, you may have forgotten something essential. You love the people you’re shopping and cooking for. Presumably, that’s why you are spending an occasion with them that we as a society have deemed to be special. At the very least, you love some of them. Spouses and children that you don’t adore quite so much may come along as part of the package, but that’s the problem with loving people. It forces you to do the best you can to value the others in their lives, too. While not always pleasant, this very effort makes us better, more empathetic people. Let Sue return the gift if she wants to, tell half your family they get to eat Japanese-style off the coffee table, and stop worrying. As long as you do everything with love, all will be well. The love matters more than the gifts or the food ever will. (And I say that as a person who likes gifts and food a lot.)
The holidays are for the heart.
Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Eid al-Fitr, Winter Solstice (the list goes on): whichever you choose to celebrate, they all have one thing in common. Macy’s didn’t create them. Or Best Buy, or Toys ‘R Us, or Target. They all have their roots in the spirit. Do yourself a favor and before you buy one more thing, read your source material. I can only speak with any authority about Christmas, since that’s my tradition – check the Bible verses Matthew 1:18-2:12, Luke 26:38, and Luke 2:1-21. (I’m sure you know where to read about your own tradition, but here’s a webpage to research any holidays above that make you curious.) In these Bible passages, you will find not one word about which gifts to buy your children, how big a feast to prepare, or how many lights to put on your house. The only gifts mentioned are given to Jesus. (Food for thought, my fellow Christians – how many gifts did you get for Jesus this year?) The central message is that Jesus himself is the gift, given to all of us. The other celebrations that we associate with gift-giving have equally non-commercial roots. Even the completely secular Santa Claus mythology stems from the legend of St. Nicholas of Myra, a man renowned for giving money to a destitute father. The offering meant that the man’s three daughters could have dowries and get married, instead of having to become prostitutes (the only available option to make their own living). The point wasn’t to shower them with presents, it was to help the girls live honorable lives. By that example, a good gift would be a donation to a women’s college. You can actually celebrate any of these occasions with no gifts or food at all. The point is always the love that binds us together, not the tokens we use in an attempt to make that love three-dimensional.
You can love God and your family and do good things all year round.
There isn’t actually a time limit stamped on any of the wonderful things we associate with the holidays. You can buy someone a present, get your family together for a meal, volunteer at a homeless shelter and sing Christmas carols during the other eleven months of the year, too, if you feel like it. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” lives on my mp3 player all year long, and gets played more often than you probably want to know about. (If you’re partial to “Joy to the World,” you don’t even have to feel weird. Pay attention some time – the song never actually mentions Christmas.) The Islamic tradition is particularly smart about this: their major holy season of Ramadan (which ends in the above-mentioned Eid al-Fitr) rotates throughout the year, so that in the average lifetime you will have observed it in every single month. Do not feel pressured to buy everything and go to every party and eat yourself senseless all in the next thirty days. If you see a gift that would be perfect for someone but you can’t afford it, just get her something small now, and buy her that perfect item in March when you’ve had a chance to save some money. No one worthy of such a gift is going to refuse it for being non-seasonal, and giving a gift in March shows you truly don’t expect anything in return. If you feel bad for not making it to a party, tell the hosts that you really want to see them and set a date to get together in January. True friends know you can’t be everywhere at once. Stop killing yourself trying to make everything happen now. Pick what works for you, and let the other stuff go. (Bonus tip: homeless shelters don’t actually need you on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I volunteered at one of the largest shelters in Los Angeles and the staff told me they have waiting lists of companies wanting to volunteer on the actual day. Mark your calendar to go down to the mission on a cold day in February, when everyone else has forgotten.)
Maybe I can best sum up this series of posts with a factoid: Christmas probably didn’t actually happen in December. I found a source assigning Christ’s birth in September, and I’ve also heard April, though I can’t find a reliable citation for that one. Fact is, no one really knows. Most all of these holidays (excepting the refuses-to-be-pinned-down Ramadan) were assigned a date in winter long ago. Why? Because it’s dark and cold outside, and in the words of my tradition, “Where two or three of you are gathered together in my name, I am there in your midst” (Matthew 18:20). Gathering together warms us in body and soul, and reminds us that even on the longest nights of the year, we are not alone. The physical light will return, and spiritual Light never left.
Embrace the new. Make a list of things you want that can’t be bought. Pay attention to the obvious joy around you. By bringing joy into your life, you not only escape the holiday-daze, you actually bring us a step closer to that world peace we all crave.
I wish each and every one of you a holiday season filled with such overflowing love that you are forced to give some of it away.
Kimberly would like to take credit for this column series, but she has a feeling Someone helped…a lot. Truthfully, Kimberly wrote these posts the way she used to help with the holiday baking when she was five, which is to say by not getting in the way too much.
