Entries

Everything. Is. Closed.

From December 26, 1996: Anyway, I’ve been getting progressively more nervous watching Todd wistfully admire the christmas decorations around town and finally I said, “Am I a fool? Do you really secretly adore christmas and want to celebrate it after all and you’re not celebrating it to please me? What if we have the Hypothetical Child and you suddenly want to go to midnight mass and buy a tree and sing dumb songs and –” Todd grinned and said, “Yes, well, it’s tradition to chant around a dead tree for christmas, don’tcha know,” which made me laugh. “But seriously, have I been completely missing the point? Do you wish we celebrated christmas? Do you hate that we don’t?” He said, “No, no, not at all. I promise.”

And we never have celebrated Christmas, even though both of us were brought up in homes where Christmas was a huge celebration. Todd hasn’t set foot in a Catholic church since he was, like, twelve. And the Hypothetical Child? ”

This is the first year that Paul’s expressed any interest at all in the phenomenon - mostly, I think, because he saw a giant blow-up doll of the Grinch in front of a department store and liked the fact that it was a monster dressed up in Santa clothes. He asked to hear the story over and over. I hate that story. If there was ever a story in which I was rooting for the bad guy, the Grinch would be it. So he asked briefly about celebrating, I hemmed and hawed and he forgot about it soon afterwards. If he wants to celebrate it next year, we can buy gifts for homeless children and get together with a carol-singing group, but I’m hoping that was a passing phase. (Hm. Actually, reading that over, buying gifts for homeless children seems like something we should do regardless.)

Here’s the thing: I don’t believe in god -

From February 7, 1996: I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before, but I used to be VERY religious. I mean, church on Sundays and reading religious books and the bible, etc. And I remember being eleven years old and staring out the window of the bedroom I shared with Spring, and praying for something. Maybe to pass a test, or to have friends, something along those lines. Thinking, “please, god, please let this happen, please please please” and then suddenly stopping. Suddenly realizing that I wasn’t talking to anyone at all. I was trying so hard to believe in something, to convince myself that yes, god existed, and none of it was any more real than if I’d been staring out my window and talking to one of the cars in the parking lot, or a rock. And what a relief to not be striving so hard to believe in [what is for ME] this amorphous nothing of a concept.

and I won’t perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus -

From April 5, 1996: [In elementary school] I generally ended up with no one on my left and the only other left-handed kid in the class across from me, and I remember that he knew that there was no Santa Claus. I was absolutely convinced that Santa Claus existed, and when he’d start in about how his parents had admitted to him the year before that it was all a big lie I’d put my hands over my ears and hum. When I actually did find out — via a price tag that wasn’t entirely scratched off of this box containing a wooden dollhouse — I was furious that I’d been lied to. I cried for hours, not because of the loss of Santa Claus, but because of the lie.

So if you take the two major factors out of the mix, what’s left? Chanting around a dead tree? I know that for some people, Christmas is truly a time of family togetherness, memories, giving. Me? Not so much. It feels hypocritical to me. It feels about as real as the time I stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve with my best friend. It was the first time I’d stayed up after my dad had gone to sleep, and it was thrilling. We clutched our bottle of sparkling apple juice and the minute Dick Clark yelled Happy New Year! we opened it. And looked at each other and said, “Huh. That was kind of…not as meaningful as I was expecting it to be.”

© 2003 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).