I spent the week leading up to Christmas in a cabin with my family next to a frigid lake in Oklahoma. When I sat down to write this, I was planning on doing this whole bit about the frustrations of Christmas, replete with scriptural allusions and caustic bitterness. You know, almost precisely what you would expect from me. It started pretty easily. Most of the aspects of Christmas annoy me. 2000 years ago a guy who never bought anyone a present in the entirety his much debated and nevertheless world changing life was born in a shack, probably some time in August. On top of the inherent ludicrosity (yeah, I made that word up) of thee when and how we celebrate this day, the consumerism we have built into the day is pushing the holiday season deeper and deeper into the autumn weeks, which are brief enough in Arizona as it is. The evils of Christmas Creep have been much bemoaned elsewhere, but in case you happen to own a major media or consumer company and you haven't been paying attention: QUIT PUSHING CHRISTMAS ON US!!! The 12 days of Christmas have been more than enough for thousands of holidays before this year, we don't suddenly need 12 weeks of it now. Give us time to enjoy Halloween and Thanksgiving before settling into the materialist driven stress of the fat man. There are plenty of things about this holiday, and this whole season (see footnote for example) to go off about, but There was a moment that against all odds lightened my pervasive gloom and got me thinking about all the things that make this a special time of year.
We are visiting with my grandparents here, who are getting on in years, approaching that twilight where gets a bit more beautiful for its imminent paucity. Not quite there, but closer. We were all sitting around paying rapt attention to the clinic that I was holding on the bridge table when my grandmother's youngest son walked in to surprise her. She wasn't expecting to see him this season, and she broke into tears when he came through the door. This is the kind of moment that is truly at the heart of everything that we do this time of year. it is an excuse to allow ourselves to really delve into the depth of the emotion that we feel for our loved ones, with a reckless abandon that would be exhausting if we pursued it year round. A lot of this is accomplished by pushing the ever invasive world at large back to arms length and letting ourselves just dwell with a bit more awareness in the togetherness of family moments, whether it is the comfort with which we fight over taking pictures, the stories that we all laugh at for the hundredth time, or the moment when everyone decides to spontaneously throw mashed potatoes at the youngest sibling. The other, and much less significant way that we show this emotion is in the giving of gifts.
Gift giving is an incredibly powerful and vulnerable experience. I learned this the way kids learn anything: the hard way. I was in my early teens, and there was a cd that I was soooo excited about. For all of you who were not big on the mid 90's music scene, this was just around the time of Napster, before the onset of glorious iTunes, and I lived in the sticks so there was no high speed internet. The short of it is, you had to still go buy the actual disc to get your music. So imagine living in this pre-musical liberation world and there is a cd that you go around talking about for weeks, months even. Ok, enough with dodging the issue. It was the first NSync album. I watched the Disney concert, knew the dance moves, all the words. Yes, I still liked girls. In any case, I was hyped on this album and Christmas morning rolls around and my mother actually went to the tree and grabbed one of the presents and brought it to me, standing there watching as I opened it. Her face was glowing, eyes eager, the anticipation that only comes when you know that you are about to make one of the day of one of the dearest people in the world to you. I unwrapped that shiny blue case with Justin and JC and the boys smiling out at me and my mother caught her breath, waiting for the reaction... I looked up. "Mom, I bought this last week." Derisively I tossed the cd to the side and reached back into the pile. out of the corner of my eye I see my mother's face fall, tears welling up in her eyes, and she starts telling me that I can return it. This moment has never left my mind. Giving a gift, that is, trying to give a good gift, is a very vulnerable experience. And to be clear, a gift card is never a good gift. I am not saying that they are bad gifts, but a good gift is a painstaking, deliberate searching out for that thing, that moment which will not just be appreciated but be the key stone of a glorious arch of joy and utility. it says that I know you, intimately, and value who you are and what is meaningful to you. A gift treasured is an affirmation of that knowledge and a validation of the relationship. A gift spurned is is precisely the opposite. You cannot really give a good gift to someone until they begin to embrace the world around them and engage in things passionately, so to some people who roll through life as mere bystanders you can never give a good gift. This was my mother's first real effort to give me a good gift and my reaction had consequences that rolled down through the years. Since then I have made every effort to give as good of a gift as possible, to risk that moment of vulnerability, to tell all the people that I love how much they mean to me.
-Written on the latest of the good gifts my mother still gives me.
Footnote:
Know your traditions. Do you know where the Christmas tree comes from? You know that little nativity scene with the snow and the tree and the cute little kid with all the animals. I was a shack in the summer in the middle of the desert! What snow? Have you ever seen pictures of Israel? Did you see any freaking pine trees? The evergreen come the Celtic/druidic tradition of keeping a fire lit throughout the longest night of the year, to bring the sun back out of the darkness. Some years were worse than others, less rain, poorer harvest, Caesar killed everybody. In those years they would tie captives or slaves onto the tree to appease whatever gods they might have offended. Human sacrifice gradually grew distasteful over the centuries, so instead of burning the slaves, they would tie little dolls to the tree and then burn it. Then they would just tie candles on the tree with the dolls to symbolize burning in effigy the slaves they no longer had. So as you look at your pretty tree with all its fancy lights and carefully crafted ornaments take a moment to reflect on the thousand year old ritual of pagan human sacrifice you are carrying on.
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