Blue Christmas

I just saw an article today in the newspaper about a church that will hold a “Blue Christmas” service this week. The minister will wear blue, and all of the members of the congregation are encouraged to wear blue jeans to church. The point, according to the minister, is that you can’t and shouldn’t try to force jollity during the holidays. This time of year is difficult for people who are going through hard times, who recently lost a loved one or a job, are facing a crisis, or who are feeling just generally down in the dumps. Even when things are going well, something about the holiday season brings out the stress -- too many obligations, too much money to spend, face-to-face interactions with friend and relations who are easier to deal with over the phone or not at all.

Personally, I am a little bit out of sorts. I’m still recovering from Thanksgiving with my family and anticipating another grueling weekend with my parents at Christmas. My post-family-visit recoveries invariably involve mysterious physical symptoms. Sometimes I get a pain in my chest, most of the time it’s severe gastrointestinal discomfort (you don’t want to know the details), but this time it’s an intermittent headache that concentrates just behind my left, but sometimes my right, ear. (I’m encouraged that the headache is bilateral; it makes it less likely to be brain tumor. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac, in case I haven’t mentioned it before.) I’m feeling broke, but I wish I could give gifts to my friends and to all of the underprivileged families that my church has available to “adopt” for Christmas. Home-baked cookies (especially the break-and-bake kind, which is my specialty) don’t really cut it for families who request clothes and shoes (but they may have to suffice for my friends). I also have a deadline looming for a pain-in-the-ass craft project that I let myself get suckered into managing for my kids’ school, which is ironic since, in addition to not being a baker, I am not crafty. A half-painted child-sized table and chairs sits accusingly in my garage, awaiting decoupage and child-size handprints, to be sold to the highest bidder at the school fundraiser. If I weren’t so broke I would just turn it in as-is and buy the damn thing myself.

Blah blah blah. My complaints and my pottymouth bore even me.

But, that’s not to say there aren’t some devastatingly wonderful moments. When I picked up my kids from school the other day, my four-year-old daughter ran over to me, caressed my cheek, and sighed, “You’re the best mommy in the world.” She is definitely in a mommy-loving phase, and I am loving every minute of it. I want to bottle it so I can take a swig when she is sixteen and telling me she hates me for taking her phone away. My six-year-old made me proud as punch today during his basketball practice, only his second one ever, with his Sisyphean persistence. He lacks some fundamental dribbling skills compared to the other kids, but he didn’t get frustrated or give up. He just kept trying, again and again, to run a zig-zag around the orange cones, each time losing the ball with a little bit less frequency then the last time. I was almost in tears as I looked on among the other proud parents.

Of course, these good moments have nothing to do with the holiday season, per se. They just stand out in stark relief to all the bullshit annoyances. Don’t get me wrong; I love the smell of the pine, the Christmas caroling, the twinkling lights, and the happy anticipation of Christmas morning. The good comes with the bad, but maybe that makes the good seem even better.

In fact, maybe that’s the point of the season. One of my good friends has invited me for the past couple of years to an all-women’s candlelight Advent service at her church. It is a beautiful, empowering service that celebrates our distinctive roles as wives, mothers, and friends. The readings at this service are surprisingly non-traditional for an Episcopal service. One of them celebrates the “goddess” in all of us and beseeches this “goddess” to help us celebrate and love our bodies. This seems subversively pagan to a recovering Catholic such as myself, and it makes me want to hug the minister who includes it every year. During the service, we sing only one hymn, and we sing it twice: “O Come O Come Emmanuel.” For a Christmas carol, it’s quite dark. I could be wrong, as I’m not a musician, but I think it’s played in a minor key, like a dirge, and the lyrics are written from the perspective of captive Hebrews who are begging God to send someone to save them from hellish tyranny. Even the chorus, which begins with “Rejoice, Rejoice”, sounds grim. By the end of the fourth verse, I was longing for a little “Joy to the World”.

Speaking of music, a funny thing happened during the service (well, funny to me). Keep in mind, the theme of the service was “Quiet”, as in “Let’s all share a quiet moment and appreciate the true meaning of the season.” There were signs posted around the vestibule saying “Hush, Quiet, It’s Advent.” We all entered the nave in silence, and the lights were dimmed to enhance the ambience. A line from one of the readings entreated God to help us to harness technology and not to be a slave to it. At the precise moment that this line was read, a cell phone, evidently programmed to high volume, rang out “I Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore” by REO Speedwagon. The phone belonged to an acquaintance sitting directly behind me, who couldn’t find the phone in her purse, dropped it on the stone floor when she finally dug it out, and muttered “Oh my God” several times before she found the off button. The woman who owned the phone is not a close friend, but I know her well enough to suspect that she will continue to regularly replay this moment in her head for some time to come, and it will take her even longer to see the humor in it. I learned from another friend sitting next to her that a kindly older woman sitting directly behind her leaned over, put her hand on her shoulder, and whispered, “It’s OK. Let it drift away.”

It’s probably no accident that Christmas comes during the darkest week of the year (at least in our hemisphere), and has a traditional association with snow. The snow makes everything quiet and still, and it also serves as a blank backdrop, like a Hollywood green screen, onto which we project all of the noisy complications in our lives. Or, perhaps, like that wonderful final line of James Joyce’s “The Dead”, the snow reminds us of how close we are to the “descent of (our) last end”. Maybe we need to embrace the anxious moments inherent in the season, which are inherent in our human experience, to fully perceive the transcendent joy of Christmas.

Wish lists

Christmas is fast approaching, and with it, all of the expectations for the limitless reservoir of gifts waiting to be delivered from the North Pole. My six-year-old son already has a list of twenty Lego’s sets that he wants. He hasn’t even started thinking about all of the other genres of toys, games, and sporting goods that he would like to find under the tree this year. My four-year-old daughter is more modest in her expectations, in quantity if not in quality. Her wish list only has four items on it, but these items are pretty ambitious. She would like a new kitchen (so would I!) and a horse (me too!). When my husband and I pointed out that the gifts on their lists are very expensive, my son patiently explained to us that they don’t cost Santa any money. Notwithstanding business lesson inherent in the overhead costs of legions of elves and a major manufacturing operation, it seems that a more age-appropriate lesson for my children this year is one of frugality and charity.

We are in a recession, after all, and we have just been exhorted by our inspirational president-elect to start making some sacrifices. We are coming down from a decade-long capitalistic binge, and we are all pretty hung over. The remedy this time isn’t a little hair o’ the dog. We’ve got to kick this thing cold turkey. Twelve steps all the way, baby. And, just as a recovering addict needs to reach out and help others in order to progress through treatment, I’m feeling a need to reach out to people who have been hit harder by the recession than we have. I want to go help at a soup kitchen, pack up Thanksgiving dinners to drop off at our church, buy new coats for children who don’t have enough warm clothes. I don’t feel like power shopping at the mall for multiple sets of Lego’s this year. To be honest, I have never been an enthusiastic power shopper. I’m finding that the pressure to tighten our belts and to make some sacrifices for the common good is oddly liberating.

The question is, how do I explain this to my kids? How do I instill a charitable inclination into them? Is there a certain level of maturity that’s required before you feel better about giving than receiving? My children have been inundated with stuff, practically all their hearts’ desires, since they were born. Their voracity for new loot isn’t their fault. They’re like crack babies, innocent victims of their parents’ failings. Their lifestyles are relatively modest compared to some of their friends in our well-heeled community. The age in years of our home computer is approaching double digits, we embrace hand-me-downs and leftovers, I can count on one hand our trips on airplanes since since they were born. But, we have a roof over our heads, good food to eat, and nice warm clothes to wear. We have lots of toys, a fancy school, ballet, soccer, chess, and piano lessons. We have more than enough.

I remember when I was little, maybe around seven or eight, my parents “adopted” a real live poor family for the holidays. From our church, we received a list of things that the family needed, clothing and household goods, and went shopping for these items, along with the makings for a holiday dinner. We packed all of these treasures into several boxes, drove to the other side of town (actually pretty close to where my father had grown up), and delivered them to a small grey brick ranch house with a postage stamp lawn made of dirt. A short, bald man in a white tee shirt answered the door. He accepted the boxes from my father while our family stood awkwardly on the cement front steps. I don’t remember coming away from this experience feeling good. I remember feeling weird and relieved when I got back to my own comfortable house. It might have helped if my family had discussed the experience – my parents weren’t big talkers when I was growing up – but I suspect that a brief awkward encounter on somebody’s front porch may not be enough to convey a sense of shared humanity and responsibility.

My goal for this holiday season will be to test this theory and do good for others in a way that my kids will feel good about. I don’t want the impact to be abstract to them, but I also don’t want it to be too awkward or frightening. I’d like to give them a taste of the joy of giving so that they want to keep doing more of it. My other goal will be to pare down the Christmas lists. Crack babies can’t give up their parents’ vices cold turkey – they need to be carefully weaned. I’m not sure how I’ll accomplish these goals and keep the peace in our home, but I need to remember not to underestimate the kids. They are sometimes very wise, and often very generous. If I let them in on the decisions and ask them for ideas for how to be more charitable, I am going to trust that they will embrace the spirit of the season – the giving spirit, not the shopping spirit - even if it means getting fewer Legos this year.