Christmas Season

It’s post-Thanksgiving in the U.S. and that means it’s Full-Blown-Christmas-In-Your-Face-Marketing-Time-Season.

Long lines of cars on the roads to the shopping areas. The stores all decked out. Some have been for a month or more already … :veryshocking:

I am not into commercial shopping for Christmas like most … I’m not totally out of it, in other words. I don’t have a pure view of the holiday. I’m very mixed up.

My church doesn’t celebrate it. We at home have no extended family around … so our Christmas is what I make of it alone. DH has no gene for Christmas. I do, but it’s been changing over time. I don’t like wearing myself out for holidays and knowing it’s just me doing them makes it harder on this INTP. I just don’t have the energy for holidays like I did when I was younger. I’m older, still young enough, but I have been married for over 13 years and have three children who are still too young to help me out with holidays.

I used to get a tree and decorate it. I hate the thought of wrapping lights around a tree. Last year we got a small live one. The year before we didn’t get one at all, a first for us. The year before that we got a tree and I had DH wrap the lights around it. Beyond that I’m not sure when I stopped my intense version of decorating the tree … it was that previous year or the one before that, I amended my way of wrapping the branches and just threw the lights around the tree in general. I used to use like 5 long strands of lights. That changed year just 2 did the job. That’s how intense about it I used to be. I just can’t deal with the complexity any more. Back then I quit making Christmas Cookies. They too were too much trouble. Sounds like depression, eh? Nah, not me. I just lost the spark for Christmas. It’s partially that we live without sisters and mothers and uncle and aunts and friends. We just live here and there is no Christmas to-do at church. We are the ones who must seek it all out or there is nothing. So for me it’s taken a toll on me and after two or three Christmases in this house I just fizzled-out of holiday spark.

What I’ve always had though is a “give stuff for Christmas” thing, to those in my household. I like stuff. It’s not just a “material” thing, it’s a “give something of value thing”. I like getting things too. Things that MEAN something. Not just something for the sake of something, but something of value for the sake of something of value.

So this year, I’m really not gaining any spark, but trying to make it light up some more. While this is a ‘religious holiday’ time for many, for me it’s not. I am a Christian, but have a ‘strange’ view of Christmas (compared to many Christians, I guess). I like it for Winter light up-ness. I don’t like it for putting Christ in the cradle every year. Christ is come and died and risen and ascended.

I do love listening to Handel’s “Messiah” any time year round, and at Christmas time. I love Christmas songs. Carols, hymns, modern, standards. I just don’t go for the “jesus’s birthday” mode. As I said above, our church doesn’t celebrate the holidays, any of them. We view Sunday as the day of celebration of his coming birth, life, death, ressurection, and ascension. It’s a Reformed view, one of some reformed, not all. It’s not one that I’ve always held to. My early years I grew up Baptist, and I didn’t like the jesus in the cradle-ness of it all. I became Reformed at 19 years of age and grew in understanding of it all, but the church I was part of did celebrate Christmas in a big way. Moving from there to Georgia we found the church we now go to and it’s this no-celebration of Christmas church. We are free to do anything at home, just that the church doesn’t celebrate it in the church itself.

Through time my view has honed … that Christmas is what I really think and thought of it, a Winter celebration, and that Christ is included since we are Christians, but we celebrate his life and death and ressurection and ascension in church every Sunday and at home in our daily lives we celebrate Him and worship him and don’t do it any special way during Christmas, but include Him as we should be doing in everything. So I see it as a time of celebrating God and Christ and the Holy Spirit as I would anytime, and having a bright sparkley holiday when it’s darker outside, the days shorter and the temps usually cooler. We love and give and recieve and feast.

But in my home it’s just us and there are few traditions and so many things have gotten messed up for me. My decorations were messed up when the youngsters got into them in the garage a couple of years ago, the spark of decorating went away for me totally at that point. I don’t know what’s alright and what is broken, and have no desire to figure it out anymore. I used to get a couple of ornaments every year, particular reasons for them, but last year I wasn’t able to get any, so the chain of years is broken from that, as well as the previous ones being messed up.

Forging ahead this year will be different. I’m going to try to do more baking, get cookies and such around, and have the children help, they are now 9, 7, and 5. We don’t have much room for a tree. Less than usual, since our Kitchen remodel and making the “living room” be more our dining room with a little TV viewing area on the side. I don’t know what we’ll do about a tree this year. Whatever, if we get any sort of one I have cranberries to string to put around it, and some white lights, but nothing else. I have to get stuff if we will decorate it. If it’s a little tree, we need itty bitty things. If it’s bigger, it’ll be a minimalist-decorating-scheme (which I’m not far from liking in the first place.) I saw some Simply Shabby Chic decor for Christmas trimming at Target the other day. I liked some of it, it would do well for me. Then at World Market (Cost Plus) they have all sorts of things I like, I love that store. I like blown-glass-ornaments, old-world sort.

I like German Christmas-ish stuff, they are the ones that really got it going in the first place. I just like the idea of making a sparkling greenery symbol of happyness for Dark Winter days, celebrating the warmth of a fire and food to keep the body happy in these times, while the soul continues to feast on Faith in God, which is a Gift in the first place, year round.

Along these lines there are those that follow the Advent Calendar. I have a book for doing such with the family, but never have used it but two different years, and never did the full thing. It’s exactly the point of my life: I don’t see counting down to Christ’s coming as part of life post-ascention … so I am not comfy doing it, and don’t.

Neither do we use Santa as being part of Christmas as an imporant figure. I wasn’t brought up with being taught that Santa is real. I was taught he wasn’t. And I love Santa imagery, german santa imagery, coca-cola santa imagery. It’s romatic. It’s just that, it embues what I love about Christmas, giving of gifts to loved ones and feasting and enjoying fires, lights and warm colors indoors.

So there, I keep Christ in Chrismas, he’s in our daily lives. I keep Santa in Christmas, he’s a quaint figure to love, but not “believe in”.

If I do much about it this year, I’ll have to bake and get some kind of tree. Get some kind of decorations. Plan an easy, yet bountiful, and rich eating time for Dec 23-Jan 1 (moreso the season to me). Get presents and paper to wrap them in that I love (saw some wonderful lovely rich and gorgeous red-plaid paper at Target). Don’t get too much stuff, just enough, just the right mix in value and need and fun.

Every year we have gotten things for the children, just not for Mama and Daddy every year. We had no tree the year before last, as I wrote earier, and that was a horrid time, with presents and no tree and we had no living room for the first time that year. It was weird. Nothing for Mama and Daddy that year either. For me I want to have things given to me that I would love and have use for, not something just for the sake of giving me something, and that’s how I view others, if there is nothing of value to be gotten, nothing at all is better than something that won’t be wanted. Knowing that the person will want it is important to me. I know that’s my wish for anyone giving me something. So that’s how I go about it with others.

Christmas is a time for celebration and however it comes out is alright. It’s not a bad thing for it to be slim some years, the children do not suffer for it. It’s all invention in the first place and how it turns out is how it turns out. Some years there isn’t much to pull from for holidays, some years there is more to pull from. So it goes then that however it is that I view Christmas it’s in my heart to have the energy to have a nice time and that’s that.