The meaning of Christmas

I’m conflicted about this season.

You may have gathered that we’re not terribly Christian. Roo’s religious upbringing consisted of being baptized in the Anglican church as an infant. That’s it. He once asked a friend of mine, who is married to a Lutheran minister, what’s so good about Good Friday, because he really didn't know and thought she'd be able to give a good explanation.

I was baptized late – so late that I have a vague memory of it – in the Roman Catholic church, and for a couple years I attended Sunday school, culminating with the First Communion, which was all about the dress.

And apart from a brief stint of attending a Unitarian church for a while a couple years ago – where even us agnostics and atheists are welcome! – we’ve muddled along without faith.

And so the whole point of Christmas becomes very problematic for me.

There’s a beauty in the Judeo Christian traditions which is powerful and compelling. I like the magnificence of churches (the buildings, not the organizations), the power of organ music, the joyfulness of carols, the ceremony and solemnity of the RC and high church Anglican rituals. But I haven’t been able to actually believe it. I’m a sceptic. I look at how fast urban legends form and spread, and I think, golly, maybe this was all a huge urban legend but it took decades to spread because they didn’t have high-speed internet. So, let’s just say that the religious underpinnings for this holiday are very shaky for me.

Roo and I are not terribly consumerist. In fact, we have some anti-consumerist leanings. I don’t buy presents for anyone except the children, and those are modest (the presents, not the children. Dang those dangling modifier clauses!)

In the Northern Hemisphere, celebrations around the winter solstice were the norm. It is a dark and scary time and a time to hope that spring will come again. A time to stay inside, to share with friends and family, and to hope that the food stores would last until the following year’s first harvests. Well, I can scratch that off the list too – very few of us in North America are that dependent on the seasons anymore, and anyway, I know spring will come and I don’t need to whistle in the dark to make the bogeyman go away.

Take out faith, shopping, and superstition and you’re left with an endless ritual of dinners, coffees and get-togethers with people whom you don’t see all year, and often there’s a good reason why you don’t see them all year – sometimes, you don’t actually like them all that much.

So exactly what is the point?

Well I'm not a total Scrooge because what is undeniable, is the message of Christmas, the almost unbearable beauty of the concept.

When I was a child, I shared Franklin's (at the Panopticon) belief that the world stopped on this special day. Franklin wrote:

We also had a choral recording of “I saw three ships come sailing in,” which I loved for the melody, and for the lines that always sent chills up my spine:

And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas Day, On Christmas Day.
And all the bells on earth shall ring,
On Christmas Day in the morning.

You must remember that I was perhaps six years old, and living in mid-1970s America. Christmas, to me, was a universal phenomenon; so I took this line literally. In my own family, Christmastime was so wonderful that I assumed it must be so for everyone. I knew there was poverty, and suffering, and war, but I truly thought that on Christmas Day it all stopped for twenty-four hours. And I was certain that on the morning of that day, bell ringers would go into churches all over the world and ring the bells.

I liked that idea, of everybody being happy together for at least one day.

It is a nice idea. I think perhaps that is the power of Christmas for me. It shows us a glimpse of the possibilities, expresses a universal hope of mankind to do better.

I do know that the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914 never fails to move me. A spontaneous act, when soldiers quieted their guns, sang carols, exchanged presents, and played soccer on the battlefields.

Peace on Earth.
Goodwill to All Men.