Christmas Blues, Christmas Bliss

Rev. Amy Russell - 2007-12-23

Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice. These are the holidays that are celebrated at this darkest time of the year. The ancient cultures that created these times of celebration saw a need in the darkest time to bring light into their darkness by creating festivals of light. Those of us who live in cold climates feel the need during these dark days to hunker down and huddle together, keeping ourselves warm by the light of the fire and the people huddled around it. It’s a time of pulling in, gathering together around the fire and the table to face our most difficult, dark days together.

Being together in groups, with families and friends, are at the center of these holidays of light. For many of us, that is the center of the meaning of these traditions—the joy of being with those we love. But for many who are alone or who find themselves in conflict with others or estranged from family, or who have just faced a loss of a loved one, the holiday times are painful reminders that we don’t look like the ideal Christmas card with the happy, smiling faces of family gathered around a festive table. For some, the financial difficulties of trying to create a holiday time with an overabundance of food and gifts for everyone creates stress in itself, preventing us from enjoying the holiday time. The joys of what we are told is a blissful time, becomes a time of depression, a time of darkness.

Christmas can trigger a sadness that we don’t have that perfect family that we think everyone else has. We hear others talk about getting together with their family and it sounds so ideal. I am very lucky to have large extended family who all get along more or less. A close friend of mine who has often been around my large noisy family says she thinks that we’re the Walton’s. But for me, while I love my family and appreciate our closeness, I also feel that angst around Christmas because my family isn’t perfect either, we often have our conflicts. Christmas has often been a time when that conflict has occurred. I guess you could say that if even the Walton’s have times when they are dysfunctional, every family could be said to be dysfunctional, and sometimes, God forbid, that happens at holidays.

If we examine the religious stories of Christmas and Hanukah, we don’t find anything that suggests a time of abundance, a time of great family togetherness: the story of a baby being born in a stable because his parents were traveling to pay their taxes to an oppressive government. This is not a story of great celebration. This family is poor. There was some question about the legitimacy of the child’s parentage. Is this a story about prosperity and joy?

No. It’s a story about a hope for the birth of a child who might be a leader to bring an oppressed people out of bondage to a foreign government. These stories about Jesus’ birth are about hope when there wasn’t any hope. The Jewish people were oppressed and poor. The story about a possible king being born in humble circumstances give a downtrodden race the hope to be able to move on from a place of great pain and despair.

The story about Hanukah is also a story about people finding ways to raise themselves above great difficulties. The Maccabees, the Jews, were fighting against the Syrians who were trying to conquer their homeland. They light a lamp of oil in observance of the Sabbath, hoping it will last the night. A miracle happens, the lamp stays lit for eight nights. This is another story of hope against an oppressor with terrible odds. Again, it’s not a story about a time of feasting, but a story of how the strength of a people in the midst of great adversity can become a light, a hope in the darkness.

The celebrations of the Solstice, based on ancient pagan traditions, are centered around celebrating the darkest night before the sun begins creeping back to give us more light for the spring. It’s a celebration founded on the darkness and hope for the light. The Yule tradition that was borrowed by the Christians for their celebration was based on burning a large log during the darkest nights of the season to light these dark times. Into the fire, people were asked to throw any bad choices they had made that year to start the new year fresh.

All of these traditions start with difficulty and darkness. And they all carry a message of finding the light within ourselves to carry us through the darkest time. They are not founded on big happy families sitting around a festive table of great abundance.

These traditions are about searching for hope. Hope to escape from difficult, trying times with the strength from within and from Spirit.

Let me tell you about my most difficult Christmas. It was two weeks before Christmas. My husband, Scott, and I had planned a wonderful surprise for our children, aged 11 and 15. We had planned a surprise trip to Disney World right after Christmas with my sister and nephew. But when my husband visited the doctor to check on a nagging back ache, he learned that he might be facing a diagnosis of cancer. A few days later, a biopsy confirmed that he would be facing a difficult treatment for lymphoma. He began the chemotherapy treatment immediately and we were told he would need to be available to start radiation right after Christmas. The planned surprise trip to Disney World became a nightmare instead of a joyful surprise.

I called my sister to tell her of the diagnosis and tell her that we had to cancel the trip. After many tears, we hung up facing a bleak Christmas indeed. She called back an hour later to say that she wanted to take the kids to Disney World anyway and that’s what she did. It was very hard for me to let my kids go without me, but I knew that it would distract them from what was going on in our lives and give Scott and I some time to sort this out.

My family and my friends and many of you here at the Fellowship helped us through that Christmas and the one after Scott died. And that is what I try to remember when I face the hard times of Christmas. That there are people who love us enough to still be there even when it isn’t all holly jolly at Christmas. Instead there are those who are willing to understand that you may not feel like singing and being merry and they will still sit beside you when you need it. And that we have strength within that we find when we most need it.

A friend of mine faced a difficult Christmas right after her husband left her with her two small children. As she looked ahead to Christmas, she felt absolute devastation. She felt she had nothing to celebrate, for the family she had known was destroyed. But she knew she would need to create something of cheer for her children. Racking her brain for how to make that Christmas special, she decided to concentrate on creating new traditions for her children that would somehow change the shape of Christmas. She taught the children how to make a cheese ball with nuts and cream cheese. Everyone helped creating this masterpiece, smashing nuts and stirring cheese. She lied and told them that the recipe was a family tradition. It became a family tradition and has been even since. She also designed and had special customized T-shirts made for each family member that commemorated that year. Each year since then she has done this for her children, so that they see their small family as having its own unique way of being together at Christmas. Somehow my friend had the courage and strength to create a holiday of family togetherness when she was feeling lonely and depressed. This is the kind of strength that it takes sometimes to pull yourself and your family through a difficult time.

Creating an alternative Christmas celebration is something I’ve seen many UU families attempt and sometimes they are even successful. Some families decide that during the season they will adopt a family less fortunate than their own and focus their holiday gift giving around buying gifts for a family who really needs them. Buying gifts for people who actually need clothing and toys becomes a joyful task instead of the burden that holiday gift giving has become for many.

Some have moved toward giving gifts that are from the heart, writing poems, baking Christmas goodies, or promising a special task for a loved one sometime during the year. These kinds of gifts make sense to me. But I’ve tried this in my family with no success. It wasn’t popular because imagining and creating these kind of gifts takes a great deal more time and effort than just running to the mall to pick up a sweater or a gift card.

My mother sees Christmas gift giving as a way for her to connect with her children with a special gift that she has picked out. All my life, I’ve known my mother to be buying Christmas gifts all year long and stashing them away (often forgetting where she has hidden them from herself). She loves to give gifts and that’s what Christmas is all about for her. When I’ve shared with her my nauseous feeling about the commercialism of Christmas, she doesn’t understand. Having lived through the Depression, when giving gifts was almost impossible because of the lack of resources, I think she has a delight in the joy of being able to give her children something she thinks they would like because now she can. She has the joy of a child about Christmas but her delight is in giving not receiving. She teaches me to honor the different ways that people can find joy in this holiday.

The darkness of winter, the difficulty of the holidays, the painful reminders of disappointment in our lives. All these things make this season not such a joyful event for some. But in that darkness is the seed of our growth. The darkness of the deep moist earth hiding the seeds of our future growth. The hibernation we feel we need in the dark days of winter, a time to rest, a time of peace even if a time of difficulty. Our bodies and our souls need these times of dark to germinate our seeds. Out of our darkness comes a small flicker of light beckoning us forward. The possibility of light, the possibility of growth, the possible self we see that is beyond this time.

Holiday time is often a hard time because it points out our losses. It emphasizes what in our lives is not working. We may be alone. We may be missing someone. We may be feeling that the life we have made isn’t what we want. But when we find the creativity and strength to get through the not so great time, we find that there may be some possibility for peace on the other side.

A quiet time of sitting in the dark, with some candles lit, is for me the most spiritual time of Christmas. The dark comforts me and reminds me that I have my sadnesses and my losses, but the lit candles remind me of the light that is possible. It’s a reminder that I do come through the dark times, that I do have strength within, and there are those around me who always want to be there with me.

In a Charlie Brown Christmas, when Charlie Brown is so depressed about the commercialism of Christmas, Linus reminds him what Christmas is about. He says that Christmas is about a child who was born into this world to bring hope to all humankind. A light shining in darkness. As the angel in Luke proclaims, “Peace on Earth, and goodwill to men!”