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Some complain that Thanksgiving weekend is way too early to start celebrating Christmas. I disagree. Many cultures have celebrations that last days or weeks, and in my mind the Thanksgiving-Christmas bridge is ours. Thanksgiving is a celebration of fall and marks the beginning of Christmas, which in my mind is a celebration of winter, of loved ones, and of all things good. I don't do the religious thing.
One of my trees is decorated with ornaments that have a lot of sentimental value. I've got ornaments Mom gave me that I remember hanging on the tree when I was in kindergarten. I've got ornaments I made with Mom and Memaw. I've got ornaments given to me by friends and at special times in my life. It's tradition for me, going back a long time, to unwrap each ornament one by one and place it on the tree. Until recent years I always decorated Mom's tree with her, but the last few years we haven't gotten together for Thanksgiving so I haven't been able to help her. I told her this weekend that starting next year, we're not skipping Thanksgiving anymore. I don't know how many more we have left together. I have no cause for alarm, but one never knows. There's no good excuse for not spending extra time with the people you love. None.
Anyway, my other tree is a Colorado tree. All the ornaments are hand made of natural materials, and take the form of things that remind me of Colorado: elk, bison, raccoon, otter, bear and other animal figures, a tiny handwoven creel, a little outhouse made of wood, a tiny pair of snowshoes, etc.
After dinner, when the trees are all decorated, the garland and wreaths are up and the fire is crackling, we turn down the lights (except on the trees of course) and sit quietly, looking at it all. Gerard falls asleep, but I just sit thinking.
As a child I really did feel like there was something magical about Christmas. I was always scared of the dark, but I was never scared of anything when the Christmas lights were on. Never. For a few weeks every year in December, I would go to bed seeing the multi-colored glow of the lights outside my window and I knew that no vampires, werewolves or boogie men could enter my domain. I would lay there staring at the window with a smile on my face, dreaming of that sparkling tree and all those shiny gifts, until I fell asleep. Sometimes I'd even sneak out of bed late at night, turn on the tree and sit there for hours just watching it twinkle.
Adulthood has a way of destroying that childhood magic, though I must stay some of it still lingers in me. Every year without fail I decorate my home to Christmas music, ooh and aah over the ornaments, and think happy Christmasy thoughts. Though now it's tinged with sadness because I know too much of the world. Now I know that Christmas can't really keep the vampires away.
Nonetheless, I think celebrations and traditions are very important. They break up the year. They offer something fun and pretty and comforting and purely nonsensical to our otherwise robotic society. They give me a chance to indulge, to love something just for the sake of loving it. I don't get into the mass consumerism thing, but I do love to give gifts. I like to give homemade jams and preserves, hand-poured candles and other things you can't just run down to any Wal-Mart and buy. I like to give things that can be used and enjoyed, things that real people made, things that mean something to me and to the receiver.
I once saw a National Geographic documentary where natives in some tropical rainforest celebrated something or other every year. The climax of the festival occurred when a giant yam was revealed. A yam. Now this really was a tremendous yam. It was so big it required several people to carry it. These people eat yams all year long, but each year the men set out to find the biggest yam in the forest, hide it, and unveil it during this ceremony when everyone goes nuts. To us, it's just a big yam. But to them, it's something else entirely. Is that so different than what we do? In our modern Western society we can have anything we want whenever we want, but candy canes, Christmas lights and red velvet cake are pretty scarce in July. It's a self-imposed deprivation to make an ordinary day feel extraordinary. The villagers create something special by digging up giant yam once a year. Americans create something special by only breaking out our tinsel and lights once a year. The objects in and of themselves are meaningless, but cultures assign great meaning to them and thus reap the benefits of the joyous feelings that follow. Humans are a strange species, but what would we be without our holidays and our culture and all of the other odd things that help define us? I guess we'd be robots: orderly, practical, predictable. Boring. Dead.
No thanks. Merry Christmas!
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