> but now, for me...there is a simple beauty to be found at this time of year > that has to do with putting up lights & gathering together with friends & > family during the dark & colder winter months...
Well it's pretty obvious that I was raised to believe that Christmas is a very special time of the year. Not only my maternal grandparents but my mother also worked very hard to make it that way. Of course she was a stay at home mom & times were very different. I certainly do realize that there are many people who did not have the same childhood experience that I did. I also understand how people who were raised with it can come to hate Christmas. There is no magic exemption granted to December 25th that bad things will never happen to good people on that day. A very dear friend of mine & Edward's died on Christmas Day in 1991. His partner who just passed away a few years ago could never completely enjoy the holiday again. My first Christmas after Edward died, I debated whether I wanted to put up a tree (one of my favorite things) but somebody said to me 'Do it. You'll feel worse if you don't.' They were right. I made up my mind that I wasn't going to let Christmas be ruined for me. But that's me. Other people feel differently, I know, and they have a perfect right to those feelings. If Christmas ain't your thang, the heck with it. Christmas Day when I was a kid was spent with the Scotts and that was a very different experience from Christmas Eve at the Thiems. We would go to one of my aunt's house. The men would sit in front of the tv, drinking beer & watching football while the women worked on getting dinner ready in the kitchen. After dinner there was usually a poker game. There was always plenty of alcohol at the Scott family Christmases. I remember there was this couple that my aunt would invite every year, friends of the family. These people were definitely alcoholics and as my female cousins got older they began to complain that the husband got 'too free with his hands with the girls'. Certainly there were one or two of those Christmases that were tainted by hurt feelings or anger, usually as a result of people having too much to drink. The Scotts are a sometimes overly sensitive bunch. But I loved those family gatherings as much as the Christmas Eve parties at my mom's parents. The Scotts are more demonstrative & expressive of their feelings than the Thiems. I would usually spend Christmas night at my Aunt Doris's house, playing games with my cousins til after midnight. They lived in half of a run-down duplex and partly because Doris worked outside the home, she really didn't do much in the way of house-keeping. The place was always a mess. But I loved the time I spent there. So I have a kind of running conflict in my psyche, I guess. My dad's family were blue-collar people, oftentimes blunt and quick to anger but they were also affectionate & open. I think of the Scott family gatherings as being a lot more fun than the Thiems. By the time I came along, the Thiems were upper-middle class people, my grandparents being fairly well off. They are much more reserved than the Scotts and more inclined to be aware of class distinctions. The result is that I like the nice things that money can buy although I have an unfortunate tendency not to take as good care of them as I should. I also enjoy music and the arts. But at the same time I am suspicious and sometimes judgemental of people who have money or who are more knowledgeable about cultural things than I am. If anything or anybody seems remotely pretentious to me, I tend to dismiss it or them outright. It can be an unfortunate tendency. But back to Christmas. I was getting to the point where I was getting way too stressed about it and enjoying it less every year. Finally I decided to scale it back. Why make yourself miserable? Find ways to make it simpler & be able to relax and enjoy it. Of course I don't have kids and I can understand how it's more difficult to do that for people who do. I know that some people also feel pressure to make Christmas into some kind of idyllic family celebration because their own parents (their mothers in particular) seemed to be able to do that. Life is too complicated nowadays for us to put that kind of burden on ourselves! I don't subscribe to any religion so I've sort of rationalized Christmas as the birth of an idea more than the birth of one man. To me it's the concept of love & having compassion for one another that I celebrate at Christmas. I do agree that the commercialism that has been piled all over the holiday is abhorrent. But I also think there are ways to separate that from the holiday and find something meaningful in it. I was thinking during the last week that I should stop sending these rambling personal observations to the list. Where did that particular thought go? At least the NJC tag's on this one. Sorry if I bored you all silly but now that I've written all of this I feel like it would be a waste not to send it. Besides, with all of these 'I hate Christmas' posts I felt like I had to set the record straigtht lest some of you believe that I lived my childhood in a Norman Rockwell painting. There's more to me than that. Mark E.
