Christmas Day

    This is my first Christmas post. More accurately, it’s the first post that’s going up on my blog on Christmas. I’m writing this about a week in advance. 

    I confess, I have very mixed feelings about Christmas. It’s not that it’s horribly corporate, although it is, or that there’s so much to do it’s honestly overwhelming, it’s that I don’t like my extended family that much. 

    I have to wonder if we put too much pressure on people to have fun during Christmas. I used to love Christmas. There were presents to give and be given of course, but it was also nice to be in the presence of family members. Then I grew up and realized just how much we didn’t like each other. Now Christmas is an annual reminder to cherish people I don’t feel close to. 

    Yet part of me almost likes Christmas. Not the part where your stuck in holiday traffic or trying to find gifts that your relatives will like. The part where you’re watching a holiday movie about the importance of love and family, or seeing Christmas lights everywhere, or seeing little kids go to visit Santa. The parts that I used to love the most about Christmas. 

    I think the issue is that Christmas doesn’t feel like a real thing to me. I’m not religious, so the part where we’re celebrating the birth of Christ doesn’t matter to me, I’m too old to believe in Santa Claus, and most of my family lives out of state. Christmas is a holiday built on the promise of a better future and nostalgia for an idealized past. If you can believe in either of those things, or both at once, it’s one of the more meaningful holidays. But I feel like I should acknowledge that at this point in time, doing either is very hard. We may idealize the past, but I can’t think of a point in my life I wish could have gone on longer than it had, and like most people my age I don’t have a lot of hope for the future. 

    On the other hand, I’m a firm believer that even if you don’t think the future is going to be much better than the present, you should still hold onto hope. Change happens a lot more slowly than you think it would, so slowly you often don’t notice it until there’s no going back. So, if you want to change things for the better, you have to do it consistently. So maybe a new version of Christmas is in order, one that’s not about reminiscing about the past, or talking about the future, but one that promises to be strong in the face of adversity. One that’s about acknowledging the pain we all feel from time to time, that the world we wanted won’t come and we don’t know what we could do instead. Maybe if, like me, you think that the only real hope we have is that we still could make the world a better place, you could find people who agree with you and talk about what you want the future to look like. Not everyone wants the same thing of course, but I wonder if we even know what we want the future to be at all. It’s scary, but we can only change the future if we learn what we want from it, what other want, and try to come up with a way to make a world that would keep us both happy. 

    So, with all that said, Merry Christmas. Happy Hannukah. Happy holidays to everyone. May your family love you and your community appreciate you for all you do.