Skipping Christmas According to Macy’s

This year, our family decided to have a low-key Christmas, rather than traveling frantically to see family or friends, and spending tons of money in the process. Our family was simply too tired from either taking or grading exams, running full-tilt since we moved in June.  We simply needed to sleep late, take in a movie or two, and wear comfortable clothes all day long.

We attended the Christmas Eve service at our church, Blacknall Presbyterian, where we heard some amazing piano playing by a middle school-aged boy, and sang some great Christmas music.  Karen made a great homemade dinner, and miracle of miracles, Jack actually slept in to 8:00 on Christmas Day, allowing us all to get some extra sleep.  We had a few friends over on Christmas day for brunch, and that was it.

We also cut back on our Christmas and holiday cards, and went to only two parties, both on the same night.  The number of cards we received appears to be less than half the number of recent years, and maybe 1/3 of our peak we used to send and receive a decade ago.  So I was pleased to read  Tony Woodlief’s column in the Wall Street Journal:

But we realize that we must choose between furthering a malfunctioning traditionalism and cultivating deliberate traditions that we hope will flourish in the hearts of our children. So this year we’re doing things differently. For starters, we will stay where we live rather than trek back to our home state. We love our families, but our days of re-enacting Santa’s frantic house-to-house dash are over. We’re also scaling back on gifts. Our former co-workers and cousins’ second wives are all very nice people, but it’s time to stop the madness. The same goes for our burgeoning card list, with its fine gradations (”Should the Walkers get a card with a picture, or a letter, or just a signature? Would the Goldsteins prefer a Hanukkah card, or something generic?”). This holiday, we are unilaterally disarming. No matter how many acquaintances inundate us with Starbucks gift cards and Pepperidge Farm sampler baskets, we will not retaliate.

Instead, we’re going to make cookies. Sugar cookies and chocolate-chip cookies and gingerbread cookies. We might give some away — but solely on the spur of the moment and without consulting a gift list. While other people throw elbows in last-minute shopping kerfuffles, we’ll be driving through neighborhoods looking at lights. Every night during Advent, we’ve read stories from the Old and New Testaments, and our children have hung handmade ornaments representing these stories. This week they gave a musical recital in a nursing home. And if I can work up the nerve, we may even go caroling.

Will we succeed in making this season mean something to our children besides gifts and harried schedules? I don’t know. But recently we received a solicitation from the Ronald McDonald House, which lodges families of hospitalized children. Our 7-year-old read it, a serious look on his face. Then he announced he was giving them the $50 he’d saved toward a robot. “It makes me feel better when I give to someone else,” he said, “than when someone gives things to me.” Maybe it’s not a matter, after all, of engendering the Christmas spirit out of nothing. Maybe the challenge, with children, is just to keep the trappings of the holidays from squashing the spirit that’s already there.

I’ve always preferred Easter to Christmas as my favorite Christian holiday (yes, I know that Christmas itself has some pagan roots) because the focus of Easter is on the spiritual and not on the material, in contrast to Western societies’ Christmas celebrations.  I’m a big fan of the John Grisham novel, Skipping Christmas, but I’m an even bigger fan of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  As kids we sang in nursing homes, baked cookies, fudge and buckeyes for friends, and went down the big hill in our subdivision in toboggans or saucers for hours.  (Hard to do here in drought-stricken North Carolina.)  Even as young married adults without children we still caroled through neighborhoods, either with college friends or as part of a church choir.

This year, I haven’t heard one set of carolers all season at either the mall or in our neighborhood.   Maybe next year we’ll have to travel somewhere where they still celebrate Christmas the way I did as a kid.

Aneil