Recontextualizing Christmas

I was raised Southern Baptist Convention, so, duh, that came with an Evangelical Christmas. I was also lower middle class, growing up. So there was always a roof over our head, food on the table, new clothes each school year. Extracurriculars stretched the budget, but there was usually room. But our cars were used, a lot of my clothes were hand-me-d0wns (or hand-me-overs from adults in the family since I was 5’ 8” in middle school), and I didn’t get the requisite blue Nokia brick phone until it had been on the market five years and it was a big deal to have “new tech.”
So when I say that, looking back, Christmas kind of sucked in a lot of ways, I feel like I have to justify it. But then that is sort of the double-edged sword of the culture of Christmas. It’s a season meant to celebrate giving and gratefulness, so if you’re feeling unsatisfied, it has to be for a specific reason. We’ve socially evolved to the point where we, at minimum, allow people to not like Christmas, but it has to come with a story that hits all the appropriate check marks.
Now, I will admit, I’ve got a couple of those. From the late 90s to his death in early December of 2006, my grandfather had some kind of medical event between Thanksgiving and Christmas every other year. Almost like clockwork. Most of the time he’d be home by Christmas, but there were a few spent in the hospital or neurological rehab facility. So yeah, that sort of gives me carte blanche to associate Christmas with sickness and death for at least a little while, but you are expected to heal from something like that eventually. It’s been almost twenty years, after all.
But for me there were a lot of other smaller things that I had to work through to get to the point where I could actually enjoy the idea of a Holiday season again.
We talk about oldest daughter syndrome, but less about daughter of the oldest daughter syndrome. I can’t speak to what my sister experienced, but I know I graduated to helping with the extended family gathering as early as twelve or thirteen. Helping Granny with wrapping presents, preparing food, watching the great-grandkids so my cousins and sister could get a break. I was a teen when I inherited writing the story for the Left-Right present-passing game and making the yearly Christmas photo slideshow.
In my smaller family unit, there was an immense about of tension around decor and what Christmas visually looked like. Putting up the tree required cleaning out a section of the half-hoarded living room and getting boxes down from a crowded attic. My mom also had a bad habit of leaving me to decorate the tree on my own. So what should be a fun activity had this layer of extraneous labor on it. And when that labor is posited as being “for me” when I don’t even want it, of course that creates negative feedback loops.
We’re finally talking, earnestly, about the unpaid labor that women are expected to expend for things like holidays. I was one of those people who had that carved out for them before I was even old enough to drive.
Then on top of all of this was volunteering with Girl Scouts for Blue Santa. The yearly Girl Scout Christmas bazaar. Christmastime community service hours with National Honor Society. Girls in Action Christmas canned food drive and/or soup kitchen time. The church kids choir Christmas pageant that was eventually replaced with band Christmas concerts.
And my mother is experiencing all of this alongside me and never stops to think that if she’s burned out, I might be, too.
It’s all just what needed to happen because it’s Christmas.
And thus I naturally learn about the invisible labor of womanhood under the patriarchy.
So how do you move through and over that coming into adulthood? I know that my first Christmas in my own place I was desperate to start creating a new version of Christmas with my then boyfriend, now husband. I thought I could just write-over all the other stuff with new Christmas traditions and memories. It not only didn’t work, I just stressed myself out even more.
I also found a new problem: a gift-giving cold war with my mother.
It’s a bit of a champagne problem, but as I got older, gifts became more and more of a point of contention with my mother in the vein of “why aren’t you taking my Christmas list seriously?”
As a kid, getting a Nintendo Gameboy Advance when you’ve been asking for a Nintendo Gamecube for three years just kind of is what it is. Being upset that you got a bike instead of roller blades isn’t acceptable. Be grateful you got anything at all.
However when you’re an adult living in a one-bedroom apartment with limited counter space trying to make blended soups and smoothies, the difference between an immersion blender and a stand mixer becomes a huge deal. It goes from being a thoughtful present to a thing you have to exchange to get any value out of.
So receiving Christmas presents suddenly becomes a problem you didn’t know you’d spend a significant chunk of your adult life trying to solve.
It’s really kind of stupid when you think about it.
But it still plays into those expectations for Christmas.
So what do you do?
For me, it started with realizing I don’t actually have to do anything in terms of celebrating Christmas. Any consequences are socially filial, at most. No one’s going to suffer any kind of grievous harm if you stay home and do nothing for Christmas. Once you reorient to the fact that it’s really a no strong stakes situation, it starts to become easier to reorganize everything.
What do you actually give a shit about? Is it worship? Is it spending time with family? Is it giving presents to your kids? Is it just creating a fun activity? Then you add back in in layers.
We didn’t do inside Christmas decor last year because I just didn’t feel like it. And when I do put up decor, it only takes a couple of hours to cover inside and out with us working together. If it took any longer than that or I had to do it by myself, we wouldn’t be doing decor. I’m not about creating a whimsical Holiday environment that my husband doesn’t contribute to. We don’t have kids, yet, but when we do we’re already on the same page on what Christmas will look like.
We don’t do any of the extended family things, anymore, but even before that I stopped my usual contributions. If my extended family was going to be unenthusiastic about it, why should I bother, anymore? I don’t do presents with my husband or in-laws because why just pass money back and forth? Now we just make food for each other. And this year, my family’s coming up to me, instead of vice versa. And while I still don’t have their confirmation on exactly who’s coming, I kind of don’t care. Ball’s in their court. They can do what they want; I’m eating tamales either way.
My husband and I went to one Christmas market already and we’re going to the lights at the botanical garden this week.
And for the first time in probably very close to thirty years, I’m feeling an actual relaxed, positive anticipation for Christmas.