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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
So here's a question that got asked a lot of me while I was in a less-good state than before, and that I still end up asking myself at least once a year.
To try and answer that question, I'm going to turn to other people's frameworks and writings to try and make sense of the question. In 02019,siderea presented an idea that there are several different things that all claim the name of Christmas, but are significantly distinct from each other. The title of the post is "Why Christmas Hurts," and then goes forward to explain that these differing definitions of Christmas produce different expectations of what Christmas is, and if the Christmas that's happening around you or to you or that you are trying to make happen doesn't line up with those expectations, often through no fault of your own, then Christmas hurts, and you might wonder if there's something broken with you for not enjoying the holiday season like everyone else around you seems to be doing.
This is a duck problem, first and foremost. What you are seeing that looks like serene gliding on top of everything is the result of frantic paddling and churning underneath. The only difference is that you know how much you are paddling, but you can't see how much everyone else is, and so based on observations, it looks like the only person having a problem with all of this is you. Unfortunately, when we get to see portrayals of all of the work and stress that goes into making a Christmas, or any other gathering, it's either played for laughs (look at the person doing so much work for an audience that clearly isn't interested in it, watch the over-working person have things go wrong for them in comedic ways until they learn to let go enough to enjoy what's happening instead of trying to make it perfect) or for drama (the person who is trying to make this situation work is the only sane person in a room full of people who will snipe, attack, and otherwise try to make each other's existence miserable while they are together, until the only person trying to get everyone to get along explodes in a big ball of emotion, and because everybody feels bad at harshing the squee of the one person who enjoys this, they all make a bigger effort to get along and/or finally resolve the petty grudges (and the bigger ones) that have been holding them apart and making them miserable around each other), and rarely do we see situations where someone is putting in a lot of effort to do something that will go over well for an appreciative audience, even if they are clueless about just how much work goes into this, or an audience that knows how much work goes into it and tries to relieve some of that stress or otherwise be helpful so that the person who keeps taking on the responsibility doesn't burn themselves out. We don't have many healthy portrayals of family gatherings, where things go perfectly fine, but there doesn't have to be a spotless house and a pristine set of decorations and everything perfect and in its place. Or a gathering where a couple of people start getting on each other's nerves, but they figure out how to settle things or they make good decisions for themselves to try and stay away from each other as much as possible.
I'm getting ahead of myself, however.siderea posits there are three different types of Christmases to work with. The first type of Christmas is the religious Christmas, the celebration on 25 December that's about the birth of Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, also son of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, the Lamb of God, the Savior who will eventually die as the ultimate sacrifice to cleanse the sins of all who believe in him, all throughout time, until such point as he returns and there is the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting. That Christmas is church services, contemplations, sometimes as the culmination of many weeks of contemplation, rejoicing at the birth of the Savior, raising their voices in worship and song. This is the Christmas that the Charlie Brown Christmas special is about, which means I have to square that with the understanding that the voices of all of the children in the Christmas special were actual children, and then think, yet again, about how much certain elements of society scream about "indoctrination" of children, but are always only focused outward at the idea of "indoctrination" away from their beliefs and cultural hegemony and never about any contemplation about what they might be doing to indoctrinate children toward their beliefs and cultural hegemony. (They tell me it's because they're the only right and true belief system, it's saving people, liberating them from sin and Satan, rather than any sort of indoctrination, proving that for as much as they complain about euphemism, they're quite good at using them.)
Alongside the religious Christmas (the one that the self-proclaimed defenders of Christmas against secularism say they are acting on behalf of as they demand that everyone practice their Christmas without euphemism or any nod toward the idea that there might be people celebrating holidays, solstices, or other celebrations that aren't Christmas, because Christmas is the only true, legitimate, and real holiday of late December) is the popular, cultural, secular sort of Christmas, the one that focuses on the end of December as a celebration of things like "peace on earth, good will toward men" or a celebration of shared humanity and putting aside of differences. Something like the Christmas Truce, or a feeling of general cheer and happiness for this part of the year, even if there's no religious component to it. This year,liv pointed out the cultural Christmas could, and probably should, be divided into two sub-forms, one that's about cultural hegemony and platitudes that you'd have to be a monster (or a Grinch) to be against and another that's about commercialism, advertising, and profiting off of those culturally hegemonic ideas. What liv refers to as Christmas-2, culturally Christian Christmas, I'm going to call Christmas-2a. Christmas-2a mixes badly with Christmas-1, religious Christmas, and produces those boors mentioned above that insist that "Merry Christmas" is the only acceptable greeting for the season, that everyone, including non-Christians, must celebrate Christmas, and that culturally hegemonic Christmas is very clearly always about good will and peace and other inoffensive concepts such that nobody is allowed to criticize Christmas-2a, and especially not people who aren't Christians, because attempting to say "hey, that's Christmas-1 you're promoting, and I'm not Christian, so please stop foisting your religion on me" will be intentionally misinterpreted to be "you hate peace and good will and these morally spotless ideas that we take as granted to be the exclusive province of Christmas(1 and-2a), so you must be a terrible, amoral, evil person to criticize the season of light and hope and cheer." Christmas-2a appropriates moral concepts to itself and believes that it cannot do any wrong because its intentions are good. As we have learned so many times this year (and many others), what someone intended does not excuse them for what they actually do and the effects of what they actually do. Christmas-1 at least is supposed to be for people who already believe to come together and worship in the presence of others who believe. Christmas-2a is about spreading itself to every corner, nook, and cranny and then demanding that everyone celebrate it, regardless of desire to do so or the presence of other options.
There's also Christmas-2b (whichliv calls Christmas-2a), the commercial aspect of Christmas, one concerned solely with the trappings, the expense, the lavishness of the decorations, the kitsch, the songs in the stores, the thing that measures devotion and spirit of the season by the amount of resources consumed in the celebration of it, the amount spent upon gifts and how far and wide they're spread. Christmas 2b, much like Christmas 2a, is entirely concerned with the public performance of Christmas, and believes, entirely simplistically, that the louder and more public you are about your performance of Christmas, the better. (Christmas-1 has something to say about that.
Christmas-2a and 2b are intertwined with each other, as both heads of the Janus that is Christmas-2. Trying to separate the hegemony from the commercialism should be an easier task, but 2a wants visible evidence of its hegemony everywhere, in public squares, private homes, and anywhere else where there's enough space to put a decoration on or hang one from, and the only thing that can feed that demand sufficiently is the commercialism and mass manufacturing that Christmas-2b does and then hawks forever at us to spend our money on to prove that we respect the hegemony of Christmas-2a sufficiently that we're not going to be designated as someone who hates Christmas and its universally moral aspirations and intentions because we're trying to point out the flaws in their thinking. (While much is made about the Grinch's heart being too small, the Whos are rather deep in the throes of both aspects of Christmas-2, and their excess affects the Grinch quite profoundly, as their trash and waste gets dumped into his living space regularly. So, quite rightly, the Grinch decides that if he can get rid of Christmas-2b, they'll stop dumping trash in his space. Unfortunately, the Whos then pivot to Christmas-2a, possibly some of Christmas-1, and the Grinch realizes he can't beat them just by removing the physical trappings of their holiday. While the narrative then says that the Grinch has a profound realization and chooses to join in on the celebrations and return all of the 2b that he stole from them, I have to wonder whether there were also some negotiations with the Whos about where they were going to put their landfill, and possibly about introducing materials into their processes that were properly biodegradable and about ultimately reducing the amount of waste generated by their Christmas celebrations, so that they could live in better harmony with their neighbors. And maybe, just maybe, the Grinch could get the Whos to turn down their Christmas-2a as well, so that he doesn't have to listen to them day and night projecting themselves everywhere they go, in exchange for him not escalating next year to stealing all the children as well as all the presents, or something similar. That ruins the feel-goodness of the story, of course, because the story is about a person who hates Christmas coming to love it wholeheartedly, but I feel like it would be a better result for both Grinches and Whos alike if the Whos had to make significant concessions about their celebrations in exchange for the Grinch not flat-out destroying them. That sounds like a brilliant idea for a fanfic, if someone wants to write it.)
siderea focuses on the third type of Christmas in the original post. Christmas-3 is the one that's about family gatherings, and that's the one that can hurt the most, because while there are traditions associated with Christmases 1 and 2, they can pretty well be celebrated in whatever form can be adapted for the present circumstances. Church services are being streamed online, so while it's not the same as being in the seats with your fellow parishioners, singing the carols together, the religious ritual that is Christmas can be performed in a way that doesn't endanger people. (Even if several churches and other religious houses will secretly or openly conspire to have bodies dangerously together as a way of saying they don't have to obey the government if they don't want to.) And Christmas-2, in both of its aspects of cultural hegemony and commercialism, can be performed online and in one's own space perfectly well, and likely with free shipping if the order is large enough. There are still festive light displays, and inflatable lawn ornaments, and things that display hegemonic religious messages like "Christ: The Real Reason For The Season" and the like. While there may be some people who think it's not the same if they don't get to harass others in person, there's still more than ample opportunities for them to get their holly-jollies in other ways.
Christmas-3, however, is about family gatherings, traditions, and ritual.siderea likens it to trying to do a figured dance with family members. It's a complex thing that requires everyone to not only know what they are doing, but to be able to do it in such a way that each dancer doesn't cause problems for the other dancers and is aware of where the other dancers are so they can all adjust and make the experience good for everyone. The downside of this is that it becomes very evident when there aren't enough people to dance, there isn't enough skill to dance, there isn't enough interest to dance, or there are dancers with no consideration for any of the others or interest in dancing as a group. At that point, the things that should be joyful and happy-making are instead painful and reminders of previous failures or reasons why it's not worth trying. As someone who has issues with failure being extremely painful and discouraging, especially when other people are involved, I can see entirely easily why someone stops bothering to come to family events like Christmas, because they already know that a relative is going to heckle them about why they're insufficiently successful at everything for their age, or is going to persistently misgender them, or complain about how chintzy their gifts are, or want to do something "for old time's sake" that was never enjoyable in the first place, but that they couldn't object to when they were a child. I'm lucky in that my biological family doesn't do these things (well, okay, the extended family will misgender me a lot, but it's unlikely they'll do so maliciously, and for many of them, it would really only be a matter of practice, rather than of changing their worldview), but I also know there are plenty of families where these things happen as the norm, and they're not funny at all like they're portrayed in comedies and it's not the person who should be exploding at all the asshole behavior of their family, but the person who will wail because they feel slighted about something trivial and will get everyone to comfort them and the rest of the family will wonder why that you're not joining in with the comforting and be horrified that you would be so mean to your sibling in such a way by telling the truth about how everyone rushes to her aid but hasn't been so kind as to send a how-are-you note for years to the one who's struggling and trying to live authentically.
siderea notes that often times, people mistake the product for the process when it comes to Christmas-3, thinking the end result is the thing that makes something special and happy-making, when it's the doing of the thing that's important, and often times, doing the thing in the presence of specific other people that makes the whole thing into warm and fuzzies. The pain of Christmas-3, siderea says, is the pain of disappointment, of either knowing, or being reminded of, the fact that the family that you want to celebrate with can't, won't, or doesn't celebrate in a way that works for you. Which, makes Christmas-3 not about Christmas at all, because that same pain of disappointment, of failure, of not belonging and not participating, applies to basically any gathering of family for any reason. It just happens to be that Christmas culturally has the biggest push about having a happy family celebrating together. For USians, there's a really rough patch every year between November and March which corresponds with the darkest season of the year, but it hits hard for anyone who feels like they're not measuring up, because it starts with Thanksgiving, a holiday of friends and family and feasting, proceeds immediately into Christmas, a holiday of family and friends and feasting, and then the turning of the calendar year, which is often about either intimate relationships or friends and celebration and then, just when the light is getting brighter and it looks like things might go okay, there's Valentine's Day and its heavily commercialized insistence that everyone should have an intimate romantic or sexual partner or they're a failure in life. Four months of active reminders, plus all the Christmas-2 stuff that happens in October and November before Thanksgiving because Christmas-2 believes that we should completely skip Harvest and go straight to Christmas. And basically all of those holidays have the Christmas-2b aspect to them, that loud commercialism and ostentaity are the ways to show that you are winning and doing well enough in your life. It's a rough sequence to try and navigate, especially because it's still a duck problem, and everyone around you, unless they're being really honest about it, looks like they're gliding smoothly through everything, from space to space, giving the false impression that you're the only one who has trouble with this, and it would be harshing on someone else's squee to tell them honestly about the troubles that you're experiencing.
This year, Christmas-3 is being thrown into a lot sharper relief. The rest ofliv's post talks about all three Christmases in the context of the pandemic, about how many people are likely to be infected, and possibly die, because people are going to insist on having Christmas, whether that's Christmas-1, gathering unsafely to worship together, Christmas-2, gathering unsafely to project their hegemony or their material wealth to others, or Christmas-3, gathering unsafely because they desire to be near their families so much, to take comfort and cheer in being close to those that matter the most to them in a year that has been about loss and disruption, that they're willing to risk killing their family members or fellow congregants so they don't have to go through the grief of having a Christmas apart from them. And because Christmas is the season of miracles, there are going to be a lot of people who believe that because they're doing it for Christmas, they won't end up infecting each other. And the government of the UK is encouraging people not to adhere to the necessary measures to keep everyone safe, because it's Christmas and they fear the backlash that would happen over people feeling attacked that their Christmas was being canceled (as opposed to all the other religious festivals for non-Christians this year that were canceled because of health restrictions.) Surrendering to the hegemon in this case, whether in the UK or in the US, where whole states in the country have simply decided that there is no need for any health precautions at all, and others might be tempted to ease their restrictions because they expect them to be defied anyway, is going to be disastrous. And that's still true, even if there are now vaccinations being rolled out and given to people. There's a glimmer of hope from approvals and rollouts and the program of mass vaccination beginning, finally, but it's still a spark and it needs to be kindled carefully and gently, and that basically means that the benefits of vaccination, the idea of being able to celebrate any Christmas at all with others, it all has to wait. Next year, perhaps, things will be as they were. This year, they won't be. They can't be.
siderea closes the post about the Christmases by offering some suggestions about how to lessen or remove the pain of disappointment in Christmas-3, but they all revolve around a single concept, that someone has to be aware that "Christmas" means radically different things to different people, and most of the time, if Christmas is painful, that it's a real pain, a deep pain, and that, more often than not, it's a pain rooted in the disappointment that comes from an inadequate Christmas-3. Understanding that, and recognizing where the pain comes from then offers a possible solution path, because recognizing where the pain comes from allows you to recognize what has to change about how you do Christmas-3 so that it stops being painful, up to and including ditching Christmas-3 or Christmas itself entirely.
Acknowledging pain means not trivializing it, as is pointed out in the post, and so, finally, after quite a bit of apparent digression, we circle back to the question at the top of this post, and now, having read and discussed all of this before material, we see the question for the trap it is. Because the question assumes that the lack of Christmas Spirit is a fault in the person who is being asked the question, that they are insufficiently suffused with some form of Christmas, whether it's Christmas-1, Christmas-2, or Christmas-3, so as to put on a happy countenance and enjoy the season and its appropriated ideals. Typically, others asking about Christmas Spirit are firmly in the camp of Christmas-2, wondering why someone isn't going along with the hegemon and performing cultural Christmas publicly and visibly enough for others to believe that they're in the Christmas space. For which people have a plethora of reasons not to be, most of which are unacceptable to the asker, because Christmas-2 can't really conceive of how or why someone wouldn't want to partake in it. When a person is asking it of themselves, though, they're usually talking about Christmas-3. That's what it is for me, when I worry that I'm somehow defective or broken for not being enthusiastic about anything to do with the Christmas season. Some of that is recovering from how the season played out with the Ex Who Is Not Named, because it took my already-high stress levels about finances and trying to stay afloat and kicked it into overdrive, because she was very much about Christmas-2b as a way of showing that she was doing fine and of showing that she cared about her friends and family, and she didn't believe anything but a direct no was a no. So there's bad memories there, even if things are better now and continue to be so. But some of it is also that, really, there's a part of me that wants to be physically back for this holiday, as a touchpoint and connection to the biological family and extended family that I've been away from for the rest of the year. For me, the pandemic distancing requirements aren't specifically, particularly hard, because this is a typical year with regard to Christmas, because I've been longer-than-a-drive distance away from all of my biological family for quite some time now. We'll do things remotely and over television, and that will have to be enough. Most of the time, it is, because the connection is the important thing, not the in-person presence, but sometimes you want to go back and be in the presence of others and perform the right rituals of the family gathering: eat too much food, make fun of each other (gently and consensually), and make rude bodily noises (mostly unintentionally). And, to some degree, catch up on what's happened in the last year with people that I might not have seen since last year. There's nothing wrong with the way that it's being done this year, like every other year, it's just that I have a hope that some year soon might have gone well enough to be able to go back for a bit and it doesn't always work out that way. It's a disappointment to not go through the rituals in person.
So, I suppose the answer to the question is that the Christmas Spirit is either looking for things that I'm choosing not to participate in or that it's asking too much of me of the things I do want to participate in. I had a perfectly good Midwinter already, and I've indulged in the parts of Christmas that I want to participate in, and if that doesn't meet someone's else's idea of what Christmas is and what I "should" be doing to celebrate it, well, tough shit.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to reading the Yuletide archive.
So here's a question that got asked a lot of me while I was in a less-good state than before, and that I still end up asking myself at least once a year.
Where's Your Christmas Spirit?
To try and answer that question, I'm going to turn to other people's frameworks and writings to try and make sense of the question. In 02019,
siderea presented an idea that there are several different things that all claim the name of Christmas, but are significantly distinct from each other. The title of the post is "Why Christmas Hurts," and then goes forward to explain that these differing definitions of Christmas produce different expectations of what Christmas is, and if the Christmas that's happening around you or to you or that you are trying to make happen doesn't line up with those expectations, often through no fault of your own, then Christmas hurts, and you might wonder if there's something broken with you for not enjoying the holiday season like everyone else around you seems to be doing.This is a duck problem, first and foremost. What you are seeing that looks like serene gliding on top of everything is the result of frantic paddling and churning underneath. The only difference is that you know how much you are paddling, but you can't see how much everyone else is, and so based on observations, it looks like the only person having a problem with all of this is you. Unfortunately, when we get to see portrayals of all of the work and stress that goes into making a Christmas, or any other gathering, it's either played for laughs (look at the person doing so much work for an audience that clearly isn't interested in it, watch the over-working person have things go wrong for them in comedic ways until they learn to let go enough to enjoy what's happening instead of trying to make it perfect) or for drama (the person who is trying to make this situation work is the only sane person in a room full of people who will snipe, attack, and otherwise try to make each other's existence miserable while they are together, until the only person trying to get everyone to get along explodes in a big ball of emotion, and because everybody feels bad at harshing the squee of the one person who enjoys this, they all make a bigger effort to get along and/or finally resolve the petty grudges (and the bigger ones) that have been holding them apart and making them miserable around each other), and rarely do we see situations where someone is putting in a lot of effort to do something that will go over well for an appreciative audience, even if they are clueless about just how much work goes into this, or an audience that knows how much work goes into it and tries to relieve some of that stress or otherwise be helpful so that the person who keeps taking on the responsibility doesn't burn themselves out. We don't have many healthy portrayals of family gatherings, where things go perfectly fine, but there doesn't have to be a spotless house and a pristine set of decorations and everything perfect and in its place. Or a gathering where a couple of people start getting on each other's nerves, but they figure out how to settle things or they make good decisions for themselves to try and stay away from each other as much as possible.
I'm getting ahead of myself, however.
siderea posits there are three different types of Christmases to work with. The first type of Christmas is the religious Christmas, the celebration on 25 December that's about the birth of Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, also son of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, the Lamb of God, the Savior who will eventually die as the ultimate sacrifice to cleanse the sins of all who believe in him, all throughout time, until such point as he returns and there is the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting. That Christmas is church services, contemplations, sometimes as the culmination of many weeks of contemplation, rejoicing at the birth of the Savior, raising their voices in worship and song. This is the Christmas that the Charlie Brown Christmas special is about, which means I have to square that with the understanding that the voices of all of the children in the Christmas special were actual children, and then think, yet again, about how much certain elements of society scream about "indoctrination" of children, but are always only focused outward at the idea of "indoctrination" away from their beliefs and cultural hegemony and never about any contemplation about what they might be doing to indoctrinate children toward their beliefs and cultural hegemony. (They tell me it's because they're the only right and true belief system, it's saving people, liberating them from sin and Satan, rather than any sort of indoctrination, proving that for as much as they complain about euphemism, they're quite good at using them.)Alongside the religious Christmas (the one that the self-proclaimed defenders of Christmas against secularism say they are acting on behalf of as they demand that everyone practice their Christmas without euphemism or any nod toward the idea that there might be people celebrating holidays, solstices, or other celebrations that aren't Christmas, because Christmas is the only true, legitimate, and real holiday of late December) is the popular, cultural, secular sort of Christmas, the one that focuses on the end of December as a celebration of things like "peace on earth, good will toward men" or a celebration of shared humanity and putting aside of differences. Something like the Christmas Truce, or a feeling of general cheer and happiness for this part of the year, even if there's no religious component to it. This year,
liv pointed out the cultural Christmas could, and probably should, be divided into two sub-forms, one that's about cultural hegemony and platitudes that you'd have to be a monster (or a Grinch) to be against and another that's about commercialism, advertising, and profiting off of those culturally hegemonic ideas. What liv refers to as Christmas-2, culturally Christian Christmas, I'm going to call Christmas-2a. Christmas-2a mixes badly with Christmas-1, religious Christmas, and produces those boors mentioned above that insist that "Merry Christmas" is the only acceptable greeting for the season, that everyone, including non-Christians, must celebrate Christmas, and that culturally hegemonic Christmas is very clearly always about good will and peace and other inoffensive concepts such that nobody is allowed to criticize Christmas-2a, and especially not people who aren't Christians, because attempting to say "hey, that's Christmas-1 you're promoting, and I'm not Christian, so please stop foisting your religion on me" will be intentionally misinterpreted to be "you hate peace and good will and these morally spotless ideas that we take as granted to be the exclusive province of Christmas(1 and-2a), so you must be a terrible, amoral, evil person to criticize the season of light and hope and cheer." Christmas-2a appropriates moral concepts to itself and believes that it cannot do any wrong because its intentions are good. As we have learned so many times this year (and many others), what someone intended does not excuse them for what they actually do and the effects of what they actually do. Christmas-1 at least is supposed to be for people who already believe to come together and worship in the presence of others who believe. Christmas-2a is about spreading itself to every corner, nook, and cranny and then demanding that everyone celebrate it, regardless of desire to do so or the presence of other options.There's also Christmas-2b (which
liv calls Christmas-2a), the commercial aspect of Christmas, one concerned solely with the trappings, the expense, the lavishness of the decorations, the kitsch, the songs in the stores, the thing that measures devotion and spirit of the season by the amount of resources consumed in the celebration of it, the amount spent upon gifts and how far and wide they're spread. Christmas 2b, much like Christmas 2a, is entirely concerned with the public performance of Christmas, and believes, entirely simplistically, that the louder and more public you are about your performance of Christmas, the better. (Christmas-1 has something to say about that. Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.This is also, essentially, the message of the Charlie Brown Christmas special, about how everyone should turn away from Christmas-2b to Christmas-1. And while I've long since fallen out of favor with that special, Lucy van Pelt and Schroeder do an excellent job of explaining the difference between Christmas-1 and Christmas-2b, and Schroeder doesn't say a word. [video, Youtube])
And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
[...the Our Father as an example of proper prayer...]
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also
Christmas-2a and 2b are intertwined with each other, as both heads of the Janus that is Christmas-2. Trying to separate the hegemony from the commercialism should be an easier task, but 2a wants visible evidence of its hegemony everywhere, in public squares, private homes, and anywhere else where there's enough space to put a decoration on or hang one from, and the only thing that can feed that demand sufficiently is the commercialism and mass manufacturing that Christmas-2b does and then hawks forever at us to spend our money on to prove that we respect the hegemony of Christmas-2a sufficiently that we're not going to be designated as someone who hates Christmas and its universally moral aspirations and intentions because we're trying to point out the flaws in their thinking. (While much is made about the Grinch's heart being too small, the Whos are rather deep in the throes of both aspects of Christmas-2, and their excess affects the Grinch quite profoundly, as their trash and waste gets dumped into his living space regularly. So, quite rightly, the Grinch decides that if he can get rid of Christmas-2b, they'll stop dumping trash in his space. Unfortunately, the Whos then pivot to Christmas-2a, possibly some of Christmas-1, and the Grinch realizes he can't beat them just by removing the physical trappings of their holiday. While the narrative then says that the Grinch has a profound realization and chooses to join in on the celebrations and return all of the 2b that he stole from them, I have to wonder whether there were also some negotiations with the Whos about where they were going to put their landfill, and possibly about introducing materials into their processes that were properly biodegradable and about ultimately reducing the amount of waste generated by their Christmas celebrations, so that they could live in better harmony with their neighbors. And maybe, just maybe, the Grinch could get the Whos to turn down their Christmas-2a as well, so that he doesn't have to listen to them day and night projecting themselves everywhere they go, in exchange for him not escalating next year to stealing all the children as well as all the presents, or something similar. That ruins the feel-goodness of the story, of course, because the story is about a person who hates Christmas coming to love it wholeheartedly, but I feel like it would be a better result for both Grinches and Whos alike if the Whos had to make significant concessions about their celebrations in exchange for the Grinch not flat-out destroying them. That sounds like a brilliant idea for a fanfic, if someone wants to write it.)
siderea focuses on the third type of Christmas in the original post. Christmas-3 is the one that's about family gatherings, and that's the one that can hurt the most, because while there are traditions associated with Christmases 1 and 2, they can pretty well be celebrated in whatever form can be adapted for the present circumstances. Church services are being streamed online, so while it's not the same as being in the seats with your fellow parishioners, singing the carols together, the religious ritual that is Christmas can be performed in a way that doesn't endanger people. (Even if several churches and other religious houses will secretly or openly conspire to have bodies dangerously together as a way of saying they don't have to obey the government if they don't want to.) And Christmas-2, in both of its aspects of cultural hegemony and commercialism, can be performed online and in one's own space perfectly well, and likely with free shipping if the order is large enough. There are still festive light displays, and inflatable lawn ornaments, and things that display hegemonic religious messages like "Christ: The Real Reason For The Season" and the like. While there may be some people who think it's not the same if they don't get to harass others in person, there's still more than ample opportunities for them to get their holly-jollies in other ways.Christmas-3, however, is about family gatherings, traditions, and ritual.
siderea likens it to trying to do a figured dance with family members. It's a complex thing that requires everyone to not only know what they are doing, but to be able to do it in such a way that each dancer doesn't cause problems for the other dancers and is aware of where the other dancers are so they can all adjust and make the experience good for everyone. The downside of this is that it becomes very evident when there aren't enough people to dance, there isn't enough skill to dance, there isn't enough interest to dance, or there are dancers with no consideration for any of the others or interest in dancing as a group. At that point, the things that should be joyful and happy-making are instead painful and reminders of previous failures or reasons why it's not worth trying. As someone who has issues with failure being extremely painful and discouraging, especially when other people are involved, I can see entirely easily why someone stops bothering to come to family events like Christmas, because they already know that a relative is going to heckle them about why they're insufficiently successful at everything for their age, or is going to persistently misgender them, or complain about how chintzy their gifts are, or want to do something "for old time's sake" that was never enjoyable in the first place, but that they couldn't object to when they were a child. I'm lucky in that my biological family doesn't do these things (well, okay, the extended family will misgender me a lot, but it's unlikely they'll do so maliciously, and for many of them, it would really only be a matter of practice, rather than of changing their worldview), but I also know there are plenty of families where these things happen as the norm, and they're not funny at all like they're portrayed in comedies and it's not the person who should be exploding at all the asshole behavior of their family, but the person who will wail because they feel slighted about something trivial and will get everyone to comfort them and the rest of the family will wonder why that you're not joining in with the comforting and be horrified that you would be so mean to your sibling in such a way by telling the truth about how everyone rushes to her aid but hasn't been so kind as to send a how-are-you note for years to the one who's struggling and trying to live authentically. siderea notes that often times, people mistake the product for the process when it comes to Christmas-3, thinking the end result is the thing that makes something special and happy-making, when it's the doing of the thing that's important, and often times, doing the thing in the presence of specific other people that makes the whole thing into warm and fuzzies. The pain of Christmas-3, siderea says, is the pain of disappointment, of either knowing, or being reminded of, the fact that the family that you want to celebrate with can't, won't, or doesn't celebrate in a way that works for you. Which, makes Christmas-3 not about Christmas at all, because that same pain of disappointment, of failure, of not belonging and not participating, applies to basically any gathering of family for any reason. It just happens to be that Christmas culturally has the biggest push about having a happy family celebrating together. For USians, there's a really rough patch every year between November and March which corresponds with the darkest season of the year, but it hits hard for anyone who feels like they're not measuring up, because it starts with Thanksgiving, a holiday of friends and family and feasting, proceeds immediately into Christmas, a holiday of family and friends and feasting, and then the turning of the calendar year, which is often about either intimate relationships or friends and celebration and then, just when the light is getting brighter and it looks like things might go okay, there's Valentine's Day and its heavily commercialized insistence that everyone should have an intimate romantic or sexual partner or they're a failure in life. Four months of active reminders, plus all the Christmas-2 stuff that happens in October and November before Thanksgiving because Christmas-2 believes that we should completely skip Harvest and go straight to Christmas. And basically all of those holidays have the Christmas-2b aspect to them, that loud commercialism and ostentaity are the ways to show that you are winning and doing well enough in your life. It's a rough sequence to try and navigate, especially because it's still a duck problem, and everyone around you, unless they're being really honest about it, looks like they're gliding smoothly through everything, from space to space, giving the false impression that you're the only one who has trouble with this, and it would be harshing on someone else's squee to tell them honestly about the troubles that you're experiencing.This year, Christmas-3 is being thrown into a lot sharper relief. The rest of
liv's post talks about all three Christmases in the context of the pandemic, about how many people are likely to be infected, and possibly die, because people are going to insist on having Christmas, whether that's Christmas-1, gathering unsafely to worship together, Christmas-2, gathering unsafely to project their hegemony or their material wealth to others, or Christmas-3, gathering unsafely because they desire to be near their families so much, to take comfort and cheer in being close to those that matter the most to them in a year that has been about loss and disruption, that they're willing to risk killing their family members or fellow congregants so they don't have to go through the grief of having a Christmas apart from them. And because Christmas is the season of miracles, there are going to be a lot of people who believe that because they're doing it for Christmas, they won't end up infecting each other. And the government of the UK is encouraging people not to adhere to the necessary measures to keep everyone safe, because it's Christmas and they fear the backlash that would happen over people feeling attacked that their Christmas was being canceled (as opposed to all the other religious festivals for non-Christians this year that were canceled because of health restrictions.) Surrendering to the hegemon in this case, whether in the UK or in the US, where whole states in the country have simply decided that there is no need for any health precautions at all, and others might be tempted to ease their restrictions because they expect them to be defied anyway, is going to be disastrous. And that's still true, even if there are now vaccinations being rolled out and given to people. There's a glimmer of hope from approvals and rollouts and the program of mass vaccination beginning, finally, but it's still a spark and it needs to be kindled carefully and gently, and that basically means that the benefits of vaccination, the idea of being able to celebrate any Christmas at all with others, it all has to wait. Next year, perhaps, things will be as they were. This year, they won't be. They can't be.siderea closes the post about the Christmases by offering some suggestions about how to lessen or remove the pain of disappointment in Christmas-3, but they all revolve around a single concept, that someone has to be aware that "Christmas" means radically different things to different people, and most of the time, if Christmas is painful, that it's a real pain, a deep pain, and that, more often than not, it's a pain rooted in the disappointment that comes from an inadequate Christmas-3. Understanding that, and recognizing where the pain comes from then offers a possible solution path, because recognizing where the pain comes from allows you to recognize what has to change about how you do Christmas-3 so that it stops being painful, up to and including ditching Christmas-3 or Christmas itself entirely. Acknowledging pain means not trivializing it, as is pointed out in the post, and so, finally, after quite a bit of apparent digression, we circle back to the question at the top of this post, and now, having read and discussed all of this before material, we see the question for the trap it is. Because the question assumes that the lack of Christmas Spirit is a fault in the person who is being asked the question, that they are insufficiently suffused with some form of Christmas, whether it's Christmas-1, Christmas-2, or Christmas-3, so as to put on a happy countenance and enjoy the season and its appropriated ideals. Typically, others asking about Christmas Spirit are firmly in the camp of Christmas-2, wondering why someone isn't going along with the hegemon and performing cultural Christmas publicly and visibly enough for others to believe that they're in the Christmas space. For which people have a plethora of reasons not to be, most of which are unacceptable to the asker, because Christmas-2 can't really conceive of how or why someone wouldn't want to partake in it. When a person is asking it of themselves, though, they're usually talking about Christmas-3. That's what it is for me, when I worry that I'm somehow defective or broken for not being enthusiastic about anything to do with the Christmas season. Some of that is recovering from how the season played out with the Ex Who Is Not Named, because it took my already-high stress levels about finances and trying to stay afloat and kicked it into overdrive, because she was very much about Christmas-2b as a way of showing that she was doing fine and of showing that she cared about her friends and family, and she didn't believe anything but a direct no was a no. So there's bad memories there, even if things are better now and continue to be so. But some of it is also that, really, there's a part of me that wants to be physically back for this holiday, as a touchpoint and connection to the biological family and extended family that I've been away from for the rest of the year. For me, the pandemic distancing requirements aren't specifically, particularly hard, because this is a typical year with regard to Christmas, because I've been longer-than-a-drive distance away from all of my biological family for quite some time now. We'll do things remotely and over television, and that will have to be enough. Most of the time, it is, because the connection is the important thing, not the in-person presence, but sometimes you want to go back and be in the presence of others and perform the right rituals of the family gathering: eat too much food, make fun of each other (gently and consensually), and make rude bodily noises (mostly unintentionally). And, to some degree, catch up on what's happened in the last year with people that I might not have seen since last year. There's nothing wrong with the way that it's being done this year, like every other year, it's just that I have a hope that some year soon might have gone well enough to be able to go back for a bit and it doesn't always work out that way. It's a disappointment to not go through the rituals in person.
So, I suppose the answer to the question is that the Christmas Spirit is either looking for things that I'm choosing not to participate in or that it's asking too much of me of the things I do want to participate in. I had a perfectly good Midwinter already, and I've indulged in the parts of Christmas that I want to participate in, and if that doesn't meet someone's else's idea of what Christmas is and what I "should" be doing to celebrate it, well, tough shit.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to reading the Yuletide archive.
