Tag Archives: Christmas

Out Of Step

12 Thursday Dec 2024

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It’s mid-December and once again I find myself feeling hugely out of step with so many people as they start their Christmas early.

As I struggled into adulthood and realised that the end of year celebration was really just an excuse for commercial excess, I lost interest. I had a brief rekindling of enthusiasm when my son was little, but he was only five when he declared that Santa wasn’t real, so that put things squarely back into context. Now, when I see people lighting up their front yards in October (yes, October), I really start to squirm.

It doesn’t help that I’m not religious (that’s what attending Catholic school does for you), albeit that I have some sympathy for those Christians who really do see December 25th as a key date in their faith’s calendar, because their festival has been well and truly hijacked by greed, business and stupidity. I worry for the people who feel pressure to perform, to provide big meals for others, to entertain people they don’t much like, and to spend an awful lot of money they might not be able to properly afford. I really feel for those people who are told that they shouldn’t be alone at Christmas, and that if they are then there’s something wrong with them. Ultimately it’s just one day, and really it’s much like any other day other than the fact that the shops are shut. (Every year, though, on Christmas Day, Facebook is full of people asking if there’s a Tim Hortons coffee shop open – Moravian Town, on the Reserve, it’s open on Christmas Day every year).

Of course that all paints a very gloomy picture, and I’m not really a gloomy person, well not all the time. There is the fact that there are at least a couple of days off work for everyone, at least here in Canada, and New Year’s Day isn’t too far away. People use the time of year as an excuse for a party, and to have a drink or two, which is nice (although that really shouldn’t be limited to Christmas). And people do get off their bums to visit their families, which can be nice, mostly.

People other than me really enjoy lighting up their yards (in October), and buying gifts (Amazon helps), and they just like the season. Some really do enjoy their Christian festival by going to church and generally being more attuned to their faith, and others just like the feeling of well being. It’s all good, I guess.

Me, I still feel out of step, and I feel more out of step with every passing year. Maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll have a Dickensian epiphany. Maybe not. Bah, humbug!

Midwinter

26 Tuesday Dec 2023

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Living in the Northern Hemisphere, as I have done all my life, I’ve become used to celebrating the midwinter in December. Of course, those annoying Christians hijacked my lovely Pagan rituals and made it all about them, but I fought back a little this year.

With a three-year-old in the house, we’re never going to escape Christmas completely, but we have been working on moving the emphasis away from a rotund fellow in a red suit who is linked to the virgin birth, and looked at the Solstice, the real midwinter. Just writing that down, I realise that there will be lots of people telling me that winter starts on December 21st, but that’s a modern construct and I think more tied into how shops stock themselves with seasonal items rather than anything to do with the rotation of the Earth and the Sun. The Solstice is when things begin and end, and I’m happy to celebrate it.

In less enlightened times, people went to bed when it got dark, and rose again with the sun. The Solstice for them was a key point in the year. They celebrated by trying to light things up, to chase away the darkness, and that’s what we did. White lights on a green tree, natural decorations made of pine cones and evergreen tree cuttings. We made lanterns and walked the dark streets, banishing the darkness and looking forward to longer and more productive days. It felt good, too.

Of course Christmas, with its ideal of family and gift giving, is not to be forgotten. Christians venerate the day, and non-Christians hang onto the good bits of the story, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it was good to go back to earlier times, to more natural thoughts, at this time of year.

The one thing we lacked in the celebration of this Northern Hemisphere midwinter was some cold weather. It’s been very, very mild. Maybe next year.

Curmudgeon is my Middle Name

02 Saturday Dec 2023

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I’m famed for not much liking Christmas. I’m not religious, so while I understand the relevance of the event to Christians, it’s the seven or eight weeks commercial mayhem leading up to Christmas Day that bothers me. And the pre-Christmas shenanigans start earlier every year.

When I was a kid, Christmas was a time for presents, coloured lights and interminable church services. My mum refused to put a Christmas tree up until about a week before the day, and she didn’t really fully decorate the house until Christmas Eve, normally when the rest of us had gone to church. Then the decorations stayed up until Twelfth Night, by which time we were heartily sick of them. As time went by, people in the UK seemed to have adopted December 1st as decorating day, far too early in my view, but less than a month, and they’ll normally come down on January 1st, not quite Twelfth Night, but a natural time to bring them in.

Arriving in Canada, I was appalled to see for some that Christmas started on November 1st. Most, though, held out until after Remembrance Day on November 11th, which is absolutely a good thing to do. The reason offered by people of my acquaintance was that the weather can get a bit squirrelly in December, so external stuff has to go out earlier. The other shocker was that people with take their decorations down, sometimes, on Boxing Day. Gasp! Mind you, when they’ve been up six or seven weeks, they are beginning to lose their appeal.

In the UK in mid-November this year, I noticed a lot of people were already hauling out the decorations. I guess they’re following the lead of the shops, most of whom start Christmas in October. I did hear people say it was a way of cheering up folk as the nights draw in and the weather worsens, and that is understandable, and it leads us back to why Christmas is celebrated at all. The Christians hijacked many older mid-winter festivals which had been established exactly to mark the shortness of the day and the change to the days getting longer again. I still say that weeks ahead is too early, but the real reason for celebration in mid-December goes much further back than the upstart newcomer Christian festival.

Not quite how we do it, but you get the idea…

Because we have a toddler in the house, we’re not going to get away without at least some Christmas festivities. But we’ve decided to go educational and we’re having two sets of decorations. one for Christmas, coloured lights and all, and the other to celebrate the Solstice. The mid-winter tree has just white lights, and we’ve brought greenery into the house, all those lovely Pagan ideas about banishing the dark, and seeking the green shoots of renewal. I’d love a big Yule log, burning for a week, but I’m not sure the Fire Department would be too happy about that. Hopefully, though, young Charlie will grow up with an idea of why we do what we do in December, and not just see a big fellow in a red suit dishing our presents.