Christmas is confusing.
Well, honestly all American holidays are confusing (and problematic). Most of them have been infused with enough capitalistic influence to cloud the origins and original meanings to the point where, people often don’t understand the “point.” Every American holiday has issues. Halloween continues to be celebrated with racist stereotypes, Thanksgiving romanticizes colonization, Columbus Day (oh boy) honors Columbus as “discovering” America, Valentine’s Day propagates heteronormative ideas about romance, 4th Of July takes pride in America romanticizing the violence of our country, and St. Patrick’s Day, well, I don’t understand how turning Chicago into a sea of throw-up, and making police officers waste their time dealing with drunk partiers honors the Irish.
Then there’s Christmas. A holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, timed near the winter solstice, (not Christ’s actually birthdate), full of appropriations of pagan traditions, influenced heavily by advertisers (e.g. modern mythology of Santa Claus that is 100% secular). It’s the one “religious” holiday that is a federal holiday (separation of church vs. state anyone?), and even within single Christian denominations the way to celebrate this holiday varies greatly.
This makes it even more confusing as parents trying to figure out what to do with this holiday. Take the mythology of Santa Claus. If you want to keep the myth of Santa going for your kids, that’s fine. But if you live in a diverse community like we do, where there are many kids who are Christians who do not believe in Santa Claus, it’s much harder to keep this going. Ollie already asked me about another kid who told him that Santa wasn’t real, and somehow, I explained to him plurality. Being in pluralistic society makes a lot of thing about Christmas difficult as a parent.
From what I gather (keep in mind that my families first Christmas traditions were created by my parents), the way that families celebrate Christmas is largely based on family traditions more than anything else. We kind of got that going with Diana’s experiences growing up, but she like myself constantly reexamines traditions and is mindful of having an experience around this holiday that works for me and our kids, all of us who are not baptized and do not go to church regularly.
We’ve created some of our own traditions around this holiday and of course, like Christmas itself, borrowed many things from the various traditions we see in our own history and of others. We get a tree, we do presents, we read some Christmas books, watch Christmas movies and see family. I see through Ollie’s excitement that this is working for him, and that he is getting the right kind of joy out of these experiences.
Diana asks me every year what I want out of the Christmas Holiday seasons, and with great patience she has dealt with my non-specific answers. But I think I finally have an answer. Gifts are fun, and family time together is important. More than that I want Christmas to be a time that as family we stop and think about what the Christmas story tells us about ourselves and our own family. The women in our family like Mary who prove the strength of women, the history on both sides of our family on fleeing from countries for something better, and in Diana’s father’s side, not being able to get away from danger in Poland during WWII. And knowing that the Christmas story is about people who in our modern-day society would be grouped with my son as people of color. This is a story about others as much as it is about ourselves.
I'm not quite sure how we're going to get there, and that's okay. There's more good in Christmas than bad and like the way we define our marriage we have the freedom to define this holiday in a way that works for us. I'm not sure what that means, but it's a journey, one more thing to figure out as parents.
At least there's cute pajamas to keep us smiling along the way.
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