Celebrating Xmas

A few days ago at work, I opened the water bill and read the city’s news and notes page that comes with it, which highlights a few of the city-sponsored local happenings coming up. I noticed that tonight there was some type of park festival and tree-lighting ceremony downtown, and I was short on things to do, so I figured, why not?

Several years ago when I was in high school, my dad and I used to go down to Glendale’s holiday festivities in the downtown Glendale amphitheater area around city hall. The first few years it wasn’t well-attended, but then it seemed to grow bigger each year, with even more lights, seasonal food, and local entertainment of varying levels of quality. So, this is what I had in my mind when it came to civic holiday celebrations.

Surprisingly, the Phoenix event was disappointing in comparison. They had two stages of things going on – I happened to see high energy hip-hop dancers on one and a halfway-decent jazz band of what looked to be high school-aged students on the other. But the food booths and displays were underwhelming, as was the large “holiday tree” that had been lit earlier in the evening by the mayor. All in all, it felt like an outdoor festival that a large church could have put on without too much effort.

[First, another off-topic, but brief rant about Phoenix: Why does the 5^th largest city in the country have such a difficult time with these sorts of community events? They’re not widely advertised and don’t seem to be well attended. One example I remember clearly was a New Year’s celebration the city tried to put on – I think it may have been over the 1999-2000 changeover – and by all accounts, it was a big dud. They may have given it a try for one more year, but now, there’s nothing that I know of, perhaps because they figure that Tempe’s event is impossible to compete with. And maybe it’s the same on the day after Thanksgiving with the Glendale event. But I still think that Phoenix is woefully lacking in events that inspire civic pride and a sense of connection among people in the rest of the city. Okay, end of rant.]

While this street fair was not terribly impressive, what I have found interesting is my willingness – maybe even eagerness – to go out to some type of Christmas-related event even before Advent. Usually at this time of year, I’m already just plain angry at how much Christmas pap is shoved down my throat, and I retreat into what some interpret as grinch mode, simply because I don’t want to celebrate Christmas before, well, Christmas.

But this year it isn’t bothering me much at all – and on one level, I suppose that’s good, since people don’t need to listen to me rant and rave about it as much as I have in the past. Part of this may have to do with the fact that I’m watching almost no television these days – and the idiot box seems to be the primary vehicle for retailers to push their festive seasonal propaganda.

I think, though, that my ambivalence toward some of this Christmas commercialism and hype this year has to do with the recent detachment I’ve felt from church – and from my spiritual life. Even while feeling alienated from my spiritual side and bothered by that, there’s still a lot of me that kind of wants to say a big “whatever . . .” to anything religiously organized – although that’s been changing of late a lot. And I hope it continues to change as I’m working hard to revamp and rearrange my priorities since I know what a big problem it’s been for me.

This line of thinking recalls for me a conversation that one friend of mine and I had recently. He asked me why I wasn’t bothered by Halloween stuff up in the stores in early September or even August. The reason was (and is) because I see Halloween, at least as it’s celebrated in our WASP culture, as almost a completely secular holiday, so I really don’t care that they commercialize it to death. I may shake my head and roll my eyes when I see chattering skulls with glowing red LED eyes, but I don’t get angry about it like I do about Christmas.

But even with the trappings of Halloween everywhere, I found myself thinking about and celebrating All Saints’ Day much more this year than I have in other years, spending a lot of time during my trip to New Mexico early in the month pausing at various churches in the north-central part of the state to think about the multifaceted religious history of the Southwest. It was a wonderful way to be able to celebrate that season, remembering the saints in a landscape that I find very God-infused while not being bothered by Halloween.

Our Bishop mentioned this same kind of idea about Thanksgiving in his sermon yesterday, where he said that a great number of Americans (was it 40%?) didn’t see Thanksgiving as a religious holiday whatsoever. And yes, I’m bothered also by the incessant references to “Turkey Day” – as if that were all that it were about – just a day to eat a lot. But even while I’m irritated with it, I know it’s not something that gets in the way of my own spiritual recognition of the holy day that it is.

So, I’m going to endeavor that this year I may be able to not only live with but instead enjoy “Xmas” (my label for the commercialized winter holiday that substitutes for Christmas in our consumer culture) as the secular event that it is - complete with the sales, shopping, inane music, and bows tacked onto everything - while finding religious meaning in the season of Advent and preparing for the real celebration of Christmas starting on December 25.

Maybe I’ll even be able to laugh at Xmas more instead of complaining about it. Wouldn’t that be nice?

It Wouldn't Be Thanksgiving Without The Drama?

A few days ago, some of my work colleagues and I were all sitting around the table talking about Christmas traditions that various families have. One of the topics was how young families often don’t take time to create their own Christmas traditions apart from whatever they are used to doing at their own parents’ homes. I seem to also recall someone mentioning how difficult it is, if the family doesn’t start their own celebration, to maintain these types of traditions after the matriarch of the family passes away – there’s no more grandma to visit during the holidays.

Over the past several days as I’ve asked both friends and coworkers what their plans are for thanksgiving, it seems that most of the single people of any age whose parents are deceased or live far away find themselves in similar situations. Several of these are spending time traveling to friends’ gatherings of one sort or another.

I read an interesting article in our local paper here in Phoenix (although originally appearing the Christian Science Monitor) about this phenomenon in the life of “Gen Y”: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1120thanksgiving-friends1120-ON.html . I’ve always been on the borderline between these two generations, but I can certainly relate to some of these sentiments. Another article by Jeff Ofstedahl in one of Phoenix’s publications for the gay community alludes to family strife being an indispensable part of the Thanksgiving experience: http://www.echomag.com/opinion1.cfm .

It is telling to hear about all of these varied ways of celebrating Thanksgiving. This year, despite several invitations to go spend time with others, I decided to take time this year to try to spend a little time with my father, since I’ve often chosen to pass on his invitations to join him in the company of his friends for these holidays (whom I don’t know well and don’t really feel connected to whatsoever). I’ve written about these experiences in earlier years, calling these experiences “Suburban Thanksgiving”.

I’ve also been invited back to my mother’s new home outside of Cleveland for Christmas, although I don’t know if time and money will allow me to fly back there during any of that time. That’s an even more unfamiliar situation, as I have people who consider me part of their family, while I consider them people I barely know, and don’t have much reason to since I didn’t grow up with them, and saw my mother, let alone half-siblings, on very rare occasions.

That said, I’m getting to know my mother better these days, although she and I have very little in common, and she spends considerable amounts of her conversations with me trying to convert me both to heterosexuality and Mormonism, neither of which is appealing to me in the slightest.

With any luck, I will hold up well through this inevitable holiday drama and weather the clearly tense moments covered over with a veneer of normalcy -- which was pretty much the pattern of my highly dysfunctional and traumatic childhood.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that I’m the only one who has these type of holiday experiences – in fact, many of my friends have also shared some of this news with me. But the question I ask is are we younger people really dealing with it in a more productive way by avoiding it? I don’t have a good answer to that.

At the same time, I hope that those of us who are dealing with a lot of drama over the holidays will also remember especially on this day to be thankful for many of the blessings we have, even if it does seem like an exceedingly difficult time, full of many long-buried childhood anxieties and upsets.