Every year as I grew up, beginning with this weekend, my mother would start to get ready for "the holidays." That's what she called Christmas: "the holidays." Getting ready meant shopping, of course, and baking cookies. I don' t mean a few cookies. I mean baking batches and batches from Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve. We would store the dozens of different varieties until Dec 24, when we would carefully sort them into 30-35 boxes to be given away to all family, friends, teachers, co-workers, etc. In large part cookies were the major family tradition for "the holidays." I remember this vividly, and with pleasure, yet I myself haven't baked cookies in years. This year, for Thanksgiving, a funny thing happened to me. Matt, my son, has a job and expected to work on the day before and the day after Thanksgiving. I figured I would go down to New York in that case, where he lives, and we would eat out. Not turkey, but Italian food, my chosen holiday cuisine. Plans looked good until Matt announced that he thought he would be working on Thanksgiving too. He had agreed to take extra shifts. I thought, but what about us? What about me? We've spent Thanksgiving together every year of his life. Does that mean nothing? Well, Matt and I got the interpersonal stuff between us untangled (and as it turned out, I did go to New York for Thanksgiving and he did not work), but at the time I needed a plan B for the holiday. I had several other options, with people whose company I enjoy, but I realized that I really didn't want to pursue them. I just wanted to spend the day with Matt and if I couldn't do that I didn't feel particularly compelled to "do" Thanksgiving at all.
And realizing that I felt that way took me by surprise. I mean, aren't we supposed to make a big deal of the holidays? Isn't there some subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to go and eat with family and friends or at the very least go work in a soup kitchen or the like? There is a certain way to spend the holidays, isn't there?
Whether we celebrate Hanukkah or Christmas or Kwanzaa or Solstice or some combination of them, our cultural traditions mandate that we celebrate in certain general ways. Our personal traditions add an individual touch. What are those ways? You know what they are. We cook more food more elaborately. We eat and feast. We make an effort to see family and friends. We drive; we fly. We make an effort to renew contact with people with whom we do not connect the rest of the year. We write those holiday letters. We send cards and pictures. We celebrate the season. We go to parties and dress up. We attend religious services. We decorate our homes. We move our furniture around to accommodate the symbols of our chosen celebrations. We get all the special chatzkes down from the attic, or up from the basement, or out from the back of the closet. We express our affection, our appreciation, our obligations to one another with an exchange of gifts. We shop; we buy; we spend. This is the American way to "do" the holidays, isn't it?
I don't know about you, but even talking about all of this kind of exhausts me. I mean, I like the holidays. I like eating and cooking and visiting and lights and evergreens and songs and presents. I like having my own personal traditions like eating Italian after the Christmas Eve service or listening to Handel's Messiah. All of this gives me joy. But trying to incorporate all of it into a life already quite full brings me a certain amount of stress. Those of us who celebrate the holidays often do so with feelings of ambivalence and perhaps of pressure and obligation. Many of us wish some of it could be different: in our lives, in our relationships with family and friends, in the ways we do or do not celebrate. Right beside the love and good cheer of the season dwell loneliness, disappointment and confusion. That too is the American way of experiencing the holidays.
Why then, you ask, do we put ourselves through this? It's a very good question. The answer, it seems to me, is multi-faceted. On one level how we celebrate is culturally determined and there is some manipulation that goes on in this regard. A significant chunk of our economy depends upon the health of the retail sector and the retail sector lives and dies by the holidays. The retail industry needs us to consume and does its very, some would say diabolical, best to get us to part with our money. Did you notice the Christmas paraphrenalia out in stores before Halloween this year? Now I am not saying that retail stores like Best Buy and Macy's created the holiday season. Gift giving at solstice time, decorations, festivities, feasting have been around since the time of the Roman Saturnalia, which has passed along to us many of our holiday customs. Nevertheless, retail stores like Macy's, especially Macy's, have contributed mightily to our current holiday practices. How have they done that? How have we been motivated, or manipulated, to buy into it ??“ literally and figuratively?
Our consumer economy manipulates us into consuming more and more by appealing to the greed inside each of us. How much is enough? Just a little more. Go ahead, get the bigger screen TV, buy the latest game or gadget. Acquire another sweater, another book, another CD. There's never enough. And we deserve it. We are entitled to the very best. Get her that diamond from Kay Jewelers. Get the family those cool new cell phones from ATT, but remember to save the best for yourself, numero uno. One commercial asks, Did you not get what you really wanted this year? Go ahead, treat yourself to a new Lexus. Such ads, and they bombard us about now, speak to our greed, our entitlement, our desire to be thought well of by our peers, what we call keeping up with the Jones '. At the same time products that grow quickly obsolete and styles that change each season fuel the competition to look good and sport all the right toys so that our consuming never ends.
We come to believe that's what the holidays are all about while in reality we 're caught in a vicious economic circle in which retail business pushes us to consume more and more in an effort to fatten its own coffers. And we respond by spending too much and buying things we don't need, or won't use and sometimes don't even want. And we keep doing it. Why did Kohl's open at 4am on the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday as it is known. The word black referring to the balance sheets of businesses making a profit. Greed, entitlement, our need for status play a role here. Gift buying as tradition, or even obligation, sometimes goes too far. Consuming can have its fun, but also its stresses.
Two possible ways to ease the stress and perhaps step a little outside of the vicious economic circle are: participate in Buy Nothing Day, which will be held here at UUCC on Saturday December 1 from 10am-2pm. Bring in something to leave here for another person to take and take something different with you when you leave. It's a kind of swap and shop. Reuse and recycle. Second, you can also buy fairly traded items, meaning that the grower or the producer receives a fair price for his/her work. Often the costs associated with middlepeople are eliminated in fair trade goods. At UUCC we sell fairly traded coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate. You can also google "fair trade" on your computer to find other products. This is, I hope, a more gentle and more just way to consume.
Beyond appealing to our greed and/or desires for status though, retail advertising touches and seeks to manipulate deeper emotions about the holidays. I' m talking about nostalgia and myths of family. At this time of year there's a lot of nostalgia for the olden days, when life was simpler and more beautiful. When Santa ate those cookies and milk we left out for him and no one worried about cholesterol or calories. Those are the days of the Miracle on 34th Street. Don't we wish for a good old-fashioned holiday season? Some of us look back at the past and imagine a golden age when snowflakes sparkled and Charlie Brown and the other Peanuts characters sang carols around that scrawny tree in warm friendship. The holidays are a time of dreams. Our longings for peace and love come alive in the messages of Christmas and Hanukkah, in the restoration of the world through God's intervention with the oil to reconsecrate the temple or in the birth of the baby Jesus in the stable. There's an innocence in these simple people to whom the miracles of Christmas and Hanukkah were first given. We can identify with that innocence. The holidays are a time when we, almost as children again, dare to acknowledge such wishes for our lives.
The holidays touch some deep hope, some child-like desire in us for a happy, peaceful, loving family surrounding us at the menorah or Christmas tree or yule log or kinara. A family in which there is no divorce or break-up, no pain and heartache, no illness, no one holds a grudge, drinks too much, abandons us or behaves badly. Don't we wish our parents to be all-wise, all-loving, fun and completely accepting of us? Don't we want all sisters and brothers to be close? To get along? No jealousy, no bossiness, no competition? Don't we want our children to happily, willingly and successfully meet all of our expectations? And don't we want our family to be there for us in times of trouble? Forgiveness all around. Better yet, no disappointments. And we all get together for the holidays and have buckets of fun. Who has a family like that? Do you know anyone? I think it exists only in myth. It's the American family that we find on Hallmark cards, in holiday advertising, in songs like I'll Be Home for Christmas, in countless TV specials from A Christmas Story to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, even in cooking shows.
At the holidays we become children again, oohing and aahing over the sparkling lights, tearing open presents, visiting Santa Claus. Our dream of family and holidays, mythical as it is, perhaps even innocent and full of nostalgia, is served up to us in advertising and entertainment. This is the deeper manipulation and because the myth, the dream, the nostalgia, the child's hopes really do live inside many of us, we buy it. However, this is not primarily about the "evils" of a consumer economy. It is primarily about us. It is about that which dwells within us that makes us susceptible to believing, to hoping that if we bake the right cookies, purchase the right gifts, put the right lights up on the house, invite the right people over, eat the right food, our holidays will conform to our mythical dreams of what they should be. We pull out all the stops and we approach December with many deep and unspoken expectations. If our holidays do not measure up to our expectations, and most often they do not, we figure there must be something wrong with us. Surely there' s another way to celebrate the holidays.
Why do we have holidays in the first place and why do we invest so much in them? Human beings have celebrated holidays for hundreds of thousands of years. We have innumerable historical and literary descriptions of holiday practices and many pre-historic accounts painted on pottery and carved into stone. It looks like we have done what we do now: feast, celebrate, decorate, make offerings, come together in tribes, families, clans, communities. Why? Because we want to get together with each other, we want to play, we want to eat? Because the child's longings for love and peace and safety and security and joy live powerfully within and some holidays especially speak to those longings? Is that all there is? No, it isn't.
Holidays historically provided a way for people to give thanks to the deity or the creation or nature, to praise that deity or creation or nature, to placate it, to ask it for what we need, to control it. Human holidays have religious and natural origins. The winter holidays of Hanukkah and Christmas trace their roots back to a natural occurrence: the winter solstice, the turning of the earth, the sun's crossing the equator, the movement once more away from darkness and toward more hours of light in the Northern Hemisphere. The source for holidays lies in our human relationship with the earth, or god, or the larger life that is greater than us. And whenever we become aware of the universe in a meaningful way, we recognize that we do not control nature, or god, or the larger life; we recognize that death will end our lives; we recognize therefore, that life contains suffering, and in response to those recognitions we long for some sense of safety, of security, of love and peace, if only to mitigate life's riskiness. We place our longing into our holidays because the roots of our holidays are all about our relationship with life. Let us understand that the ways we celebrate: visits and food and songs and gifts, are but the signs, the outer layer of this deeper meaning. Let us not think that the signs themselves are the meaning of the holidays. They are not. The meaning of the holidays lies in their natural roots and the religious stories that accompany them. Let us not think the signs, however pleasant, will bring what we long for. They will not. Let us acknowledge those longings for total security, complete peace, perfect love, but know that they live in the realm of dreams and that nothing we do can make life perfectly secure or without suffering. When we can separate the ways we celebrate, what I call the signs, from the meanings of the holidays, we become free to modify the celebrations so that they better reflect the meaning. When we can stop buying in to our cultural, economic and personal expectations for the holidays, we can be free to experience them joyfully.
A different way to celebrate holidays, then, is to get back to the roots of the holidays. Make some connection with nature. Go out and look at the stars, take a walk in the sun, go to Adams and smell the pine trees, get up for sunrise. Let ourselves experience, with our senses, our bodies and our minds, this dark, cold time of year. Let ourselves physically experience the very great joy of the solstice. Consider your relationship with life. Consider that which is bigger than yourself, call it god, or spirit, or energy, or higher power, or natural law, or something else. Let us understand that our longings for love and peace and safety come from this relationship with life and with nature and although it is not always a smooth or easy relationship, it is, nevertheless, beautiful and majestical and awesome.
The way not to buy in to cultural expectations and commercialism asks us to look at the roots of the holidays and understand them in order to find the meaning in them for ourselves. What do any or all of the following holidays mean to you: Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, solstice, Kwanzaa. Can you find a word or two to express their significance? For me, this year, the word is hope. The holidays mean hope to me. The hope of the solstice and the return of light, and the promise of spring hidden deep in the frozen earth. It tells me that winter, literally and metaphorically, does not last forever. The hope of the Hanukkah story that tells me that even a small band of people fighting an empire can find their freedom and reconsecrate what to them is holy and just. The hope of Thanksgiving which tells me that cooperation between peoples can exist. The hope of Christmas which promises that even peace can come to earth. This year, for me, it's about hope. All is not lost, even in this winter of times. How can the ways I celebrate the holidays reflect their meaning? Our Sunday services in December provide me a significant way of celebrating holidays. Somewhere in all of them will lie the theme of hope. Fearful times do not last forever; hope comes around again. We can harness that hope and let it work for us, spurring us on to work for peace. As for the other signs of celebration, I'll connect with nature. I will take care with myself, my energy and my time. I will buy greens to put in the house so I can smell them and to hang on the door to honor winter. Now that the leaves are down I will watch the winter sunrises. I'll simplify. I'll buy presents for three or four people; nothing too extravagant. I'll buy a present for myself too, (which I have already done “a bag of garlic asiago popcorn). I will not try to make contact with all the people I do not contact the rest of the year “ leave that for February. I will not try to see everyone. I will not bake cookies “ no time. I will soar with the music of the season. I will eat Italian on Christmas Eve. I will do something outdoors on Christmas Day.
Celebrate the holidays through nature. Define their meaning for yourself and let your chosen celebrations reflect the deepest meaning you find in them. Get in sync with the roots of the season. Simplify the rest. Resist the word " should." Resist the ads and the pressures for perfection. Resist our own greed, sense of entitlement, and need for status. This is about our relationship with the cycles of life. At this time of year that relationship comes closer to the surface of our consciousness. That's a wonder.
May your holidays be peaceful. May you be aware of what they mean for you. May your celebrations reflect and amplify that meaning. May it be so.