Back To December
So now it’s December, and that means the right-wing is going to go all-out with their culture war issues that sane voters won’t make their number one priority. Of course, “sane voters” is doing some heavy lifting here, given that this is the country that just gave Donald fucking Trump a second term.
Most of the time, Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love the aesthetic of it, especially when there’s snow on the ground (which, admittedly, isn’t as common as it used to be where I live). I even love Christmas music, but then again, I have never worked retail. If I did, maybe I would see Christmas music differently, because I’ve been blessed with so many memes about how “she’s defrosting” and the like.
A meme of Mariah Carey defrosting, taken from Reddit.
Now that we’re well and truly in the Christmas season as defined by retailers, the culture warriors are going to be at it again. I’m old enough to remember when Trump proclaimed people would be saying “Merry Christmas” again because of him. Yet again, this is another non-issue that the GOP has blown out of proportion.
I celebrate Christmas myself, even if it’s not really in a religious sense. That’s the same with the rest of my family. We are semi-nominal Christians, but we don’t go to church or anything like that except maybe for funerals or weddings. And I’ve never been to a wedding.
That being said, I know a good amount of people who don’t celebrate Christmas; there is a decently-sized Jewish population in suburban Boston. Yes, it’s polite to say “Happy Holidays” as a greeting in order to be inclusive, but I’ve never once met someone who’s offended when I slip up and say “Merry Christmas.” It seems everyone (at least, everyone I talk to on a regular basis) accepts that it’s just a greeting.
I’m telling you, it’s sickening that the Republican Party has been able to take power once again through emphasizing such vapid issues. I’d thought almost nobody cared about which greeting I used, but evidently so many right-wingers are even more insane than I gave them credit for. They’re really making a mockery of our country abroad, and I’m ashamed.
To me, and to many other Americans, Christmas has diminished in religious importance. Yes, a good number of people still go to church - significantly more than in Canada, Australia, or the majority of Europe. The percentage is, admittedly, lower than it used to be. But just because the religious meaning of the holiday has kind of fizzled out, that doesn’t mean it’s not still an important holiday to most of us.
Christmas in the United States is a lot like Thanksgiving in many regards. As I wrote about two weeks ago, Thanksgiving is an excuse to celebrate something. Even if it’s just the simpler pleasures in life, the fact that all of the family has survived another year in good enough health to gather together for the meal and to watch a Charlie Brown episode afterwards, it’s still significant.
Like Thanksgiving, Christmas takes place near the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Where I live, there will only be 9 hours, 5 minutes of daylight on December 25, 2024. The further north you go, the darker that day will be.
Maybe most people have done away with pagan traditions centered around worship of the sun. Maybe an increasing number have turned away from religion in general. But I think on some level, humans want some light in the dark of winter. Perhaps, amid the decrease in sunlight, people feel they need something to celebrate, even if it’s not based on anything supernatural.
Christmas at Bondi Beach in Australia. This will never not be amusing to me. Image taken from TimeAndDate.com.
I know what my family is going to do for Christmas. We’ll get a tree like we usually do, and we’ll hang up the numerous ornaments in our collection. We’ll get up that morning and go through our stockings by the fireplace. We might not be children anymore, but that doesn’t mean the power of rituals has been fully lost on us.
And then we’ll eat breakfast consisting of fruit salad, bagels with lox and cream cheese, and of course, that delicious cranberry apple coffee cake my mother and I bake every year. During that time, my paternal grandmother, one of the most interesting and wise people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, will no doubt have plenty to talk about. That’s what Christmas is like in my family. Even in an era of increased secularization, even when white Christmases become less and less frequent, some things never change.
Overall, I’m not sure what the overarching message of this post is. I’ll admit that I just wanted to write something for the blog after a few days’ radio silence. It’s probably nothing profound, but if it makes at least one person think, that can only be a good thing.
