Today I have a new piece hosted over at Annie’s engaging blog PhD in Parenting: Christmas: a time for cookies, carols, cookies, and conflicting ideals, on how The (atheist) Man and (Wiccan) I attempt to deal with the pervasiveness of both secular and religious Christmas, in which I (over?)extend a cookie metaphor:
Cookies are the perfect metaphor for all I love about Christmas; artificial flavors and colors is the perfect metaphor for all I loathe about Christmas. American Christmas is a plate of home-cooked cookies from store-bought dough topped with frosting filled with Red Dye #3: what I love and what I loathe are inextricably linked.
I want to share all the joys of Christmas with the Boychick, and teach him to reject the dominant culture (to reject domineering as an acceptable cultural trait); I want to give him presents, and teach him not to be greedy; I want him to see through lies, and share with him the game of Santa. I want him to learn the blessing of giving, and the blessing of not-buying stuff.
It’s a bit of a dilemma.
In my ideal world (it’s Christmas, I can dream big, right?), my culture would bake up wholesome cookies, a giant sample box of real-food sugar cookies and rumballs and gingerbread people, with vegan and gluten free and kosher options, and a side of carrots and kale for those who don’t want cookies at all. But what I’m presented with are genuine Pillsbury cutouts, with frosting that will stain lips and raise blood sugars, without pesky things like flavor or nutrition.
Read the whole thing here, and then share your thoughts and plans and traditions (or lack thereof) during this holiday season.
Arwyn
In my bathroom hangs a plaque with a picture of a yin yang and the word BALANCE. I can never get it to hang straight. This probably says something deep and meaningful about my life.
our holiday tradition has been to bake cookies on the weekend before xmas, this year it happens on the day before Yule. in my little mock nuclear family we celebrate Yule, and like to give gifts, hand made are the best of course, and put up lights, and light candles, make sun shaped cookies(from scratch of course!)and talk about the sun coming back.
my parents and siblings do the whole American xmas, with a tree loaded with presents, lots of cheap plastic stocking stuffers, buying gifts to look generous even though they are nothing the recipient would want, the whole schpeil. but, we also go to my grandmas house and have a big family dinner, give the kids gifts, do a white elephant swap, and spend time catching up.
i wish the american xmas wasnt so prevalent in everyones lives. you cant walk outside without seeing something about BUY BUY BUY. and if you have a tv, or the internet, you are bombarded by media in your own home too.
it saddens me that our society is so ingrained to consume, and purchase, and gimme gimme gimme.
i get sad to hear my children tell me they are strong believers that Santa is real,even though it is not a game i wanted to play with them, but my parents do, and so does everyone else in their lives.
it is inescapable.
and it freaks me out.
I’m a pagan raised Christian, as so many pagans are; unlike a lot I didn’t have a particularly bad breakup with my birth religion, which means that I tend to be fairly mellow. (Though I have a profound hatred for secular Christmas music, which is of course what gets played in public spaces out of misguided belief that crappy tunes with no spiritual meaning are less offensive to non-Christians than religious carols.)
The thing that matters to me from my childhood is actually a family-specific tradition: each person who spent a portion of the Christmas holiday with my family had their name inscribed (in glitter and glue) on an ornament. From then on, if they were visiting again, their ornament would be set aside for them to put on the tree; if they weren’t going to visit, the ornaments were a means of remembering friends and family. (My father’s tree has ornaments for cats who died before I was born, old family friends, etc.) Other important things involve food.
So the way I think of Christmas these days is actually as my culture’s ka-festival. Which will probably make a good blog post, but in brief: the ka is the animating spirit, shared among members of a family (and if extended far enough, all beingness). One nurtures the ka with food, love, and gifts.
This understanding lets me bridge the conceptual gap and give me some way of relating my religious practices to the surrounding culture, and, y’know, keep peaceably with my family (mostly secular generic Christian) and in-laws (Catholic).
[...] Christmas: a time for cookies, carols, cookies, and conflicting ideals [...]