Christmas, for me, is a time of tangled emotions. I feel like an out-of-date strand of lights pulled from a musty box in the attic. You plug me in to find that I am still colorful but half-burnt. The time has come to toss me and buy a new strand. And that’s fine; I’d rather be thrown out with the trash. A friend of mine replied to my Merry Christmas text on Wednesday with, “I’m trying to pry myself from my back, lying in my yard in the sun, to go cook food with some friends . . . really just want to stare at the pine trees.”
Merry Christmas? Who am I kidding? The frenzy of American holidays, especially those in which I am expected to fill Santa’s large toy sack and visit with not just some but all of my family, wipes me out. I am just now mustering the energy to write these sentences even though I intended to days ago. I wanted to write but could not pry myself off the floor. When my friend texted me back on Wednesday, I was grounding in the yard, breathing deeply, looking at trees. I had planned to attend a family gathering a couple hours later and was trying to conjure energy from the air. I had planned for a dry December, but wine ended up being a valuable companion.
Why are the holidays so draining for some of us? Why, for those of us who question consumer culture, for those of us who appreciate simplicity, is American Christmas so soul-sucking? At Christmastime, we worship a god called excess, the same god we always worship. Meanwhile, everyone I know, as far as I know, has much more than they need. It isn’t as if we are giving to those who are actually in need, although we could and some do. No, we are headed out, confused and bewildered, to buy things that are not only unnecessary but ultimately depressing, ultimately harmful for our planet. What do you get people who have everything? Underwear and socks are nice. Food is good. But when I receive some cheap, inessential piece of technology (we got a second air fryer this year having never used the first one), the air goes out of my body. People know I love to read, but they don’t ask what I love to read. They try to please me with the Walmart bestsellers, but I am displeased, friends. I am displeased. At my south Georgia family’s gift exchange, I got a five gallon bucket with a heating coil in the bottom of it. What is it for? To boil seafood in. “Easy clean-up!” my uncle said. To boil shrimp in hot plastic. What the hell is this world? What happened to using a metal pot?
I love the ceremony of Christmas. Although I tend to hold an initial disdain for the idea of family gatherings, I usually look back fondly when they’re over. It’s not that I don’t enjoy certain aspects of Christmas — I am a fan of the idea of Christ. And I am not opposed completely to an excessive celebration — Dionysus, after all, was the god of excess and the god of frenzy. But in a culture that is always excessive, perpetually wasteful, Christmas becomes a reminder of the worst aspects of American consumerism and of our collective fixation on monetary wealth.
Considering Christ, who according to the Bible preached vehemently against the dangers of materialism in the context of a spiritual life (16 of 38 parables deal directly with money), I find the American (or more generally the western) style of celebrating his birth highly ironic. There is reason to believe that Jesus might have been a member of the cave-dwelling anti-materialist cult known as the Essenes. He turned the freaking money tables over! So I ask: When, dear neighbors, shall we put Christ back in Christmas? Also, it is more likely than not that if Jesus was a historical person, he was not born in December. More on that in a moment.
I am searching for ways to live a more authentic life, closer to nature, closer to our original purpose, not necessarily to fulfill a primal niche within my native ecosystem, although I wish that were possible. The plight of modern humans is that our native ecosystem is long-gone. We cannot return to our original state of innocence just like we cannot return to our place of origin. We are homeless in a sense. The best case scenario is that we gaze back into the woods, reflecting upon what we lost. As Emerson put it, “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.” If the earth is a body, modernity has tipped the scales toward disease. As consumer culture metastasized across the planet, we outsmarted the body’s immune function. Now, in extremis, the sickness has spread to every part of the organism.
I want to live authentically for selfish reasons, because it makes me feel good. Because nature is beauty and bliss but also brutality. I long for her brutality like I long for honesty and sincerity in a superficial world. Because pain is a doorway to growth and understanding. Because life is not only mean but it can teach mean lessons. For the same reason, my resolution each new year is to workout when I least feel like it and to write when I least feel like it. Because scarcity teaches us a natural form of gratitude. This is why fasting makes your brain work better and abstinence makes you feel spiritually awake and physically alive. Eating sugar makes me feel like trash but eating vegetables and protein cooked in healthy natural fats makes me feel like a superhuman. Our society is a sugar-eating, sugar-coating system of denial. We want to trade what will make us better in the long run for what makes us feel better in the next five minutes. This is the way of drugs and disease.
My primary problem with modernity is that it makes the pursuit of authenticity difficult. The great irony of the modern world is that we have invented technologies to free us from menial tasks, but those same technologies enslave us. We have done away with wash day at the creek, which admittedly, while that sounds quaint, I am not really interested in, and we have replaced such pure primitive ways of living with email life, and the expectation of constant communication, which is a form of slavery. I’m not arguing that our evolution toward technology wasn’t natural — it seems reasonable to find ways to make creek-washing less time-consuming. There is reason to believe that washing machines are at least partly responsible for the great works of art produced by the middle and lower classes. But modern Christmas (I had this thought while in the checkout line at Marshall’s buying my mother a stainless steel frying pan), as well as other modern holidays and our civilization in general, has gone far beyond necessity, far into the realm of self-annihilating absurdity.
Maybe menial tasks exist no matter what mode of life you choose. Bullshit tasks may simply be a natural part of living. It’s only that in primitive life, daily tasks hold more meaning. You hunt and gather because you have to provide food. I answer emails based around abstract ideas and social constructions so I can purchase exotic fruits from the grocery store. I have always been attracted to Thoreau because he was a character obsessed with avoiding bullshit tasks. I am still infinitely attracted to some of his more smart-ass comments like, “If a man doesn’t eat, he need not work,” flipping the Bible verse from 2 Thessalonians, “If any would not work, neither shall he eat,” on its head.
My job gifts me an extra long, extra complicated to-do list almost daily. I am certain that if I worked 24 hours a day for seven straight days, I would still have work to do. When I make it to a break, five days before Christmas, I am both exhausted and confronted with an array of chores and errands that have gone ignored amid my busy work schedule. And this is what pisses me off about civilization, or shall I say life. I must have time to take walks, aimless walks, for no other purpose than to absorb beauty and perhaps to pluck wild herbs for tea. I must have time to do nothing, to hear nothing and to say nothing, to stare at trees. These are the stipulations for me to have a basically sane existence. When the to-do list keeps returning like some immortal samurai, I go insane, I give up — we all do.
There was a time a few years ago when I was less busy at work, made less money, and enjoyed a healthier work-life balance. In those days, I was known for disappointing family members with homemade, hand-me-down, or crafted-from-nature gifts. I would give bags of turnips or collards that I grew in my garden, jars of homemade salsa, or bundles of fat-lighter wood I chopped from an old pine stump with my hatchet. These were excellent gifts in my mind; I would have been happy to receive them. I simply didn’t have the money for extravagant gifts then but also I cared less in those days about my polo-wearing family scoffing at my offerings. These days, I am asking myself what happened to that young man. Why, despite my best efforts, am I sliding toward the conformist hell of outlet malls? Two days before Christmas, I found myself at Bass Pro Shops in Macon (okay, they do have some cool outdoors stuff); I did not go there — I found myself there. I am writing this to blame not only society but to blame myself for not being more aware. I am responsible for how I behave at Christmastime, right?
Nothing I have said so far matters very much because I am dad to a beautiful eight-year-old girl, who, despite her innocence and sweetness, is thoroughly spoiled by her grandparents, thoroughly expectant of nice things at Christmas. If there is no other theme you gather from this piece (knowing that themes should not be explicitly stated), gather this, dear reader: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I am blaming myself because, even with a busy work schedule, my bending over and taking it from American Material Christmas isn’t so much a matter of society oppressing me as much as it is a matter of my own avoidant disorganized personality. I don’t want to think about Christmas until at least December 15th, so instead of making a plan that will align with my spirit and better judgement, I put it off, opening myself to the demonic forces of modern “necessity.”
This year, Lula asked for a loft bed, one with a sleeping area on top and a desk area below. She’s a bright child. She studies, reads books, is curious about nature, and loves animals and history, so I took her asking for a desk as a good sign. She started telling her mom and I what she wanted after Thanksgiving. I could’ve easily built a nice loft bed. I could have found some plans online, gathered the materials — I’m imagining some of them could’ve been carved from the wild — and built something full of character and charm. But around the first of December, I was face-deep in end-of-semester checklists. I was trying to close out teaching my first college class, English 1101, with final papers to grade and grades to enter. (Really, you see, I am sharing the responsibility of my downfall with modernity.) I ordered a bed online. It was set to be delivered by December 16th — and of course, putting the bed together would still require a day of work.
December 16th came and went. An email update said that the bed would be delivered no later than December 25th. Two days before Christmas, still with no loft bed, we started to feel the pressure. We had a few other small presents for Lula but the bed was the main gift. We had planned to send her to grandma’s for a couple days while we transformed her room. Was I to tell her that Santa had a blowout? One of the reindeer had an arthritic flare-up? On Christmas Eve Eve, I decided to head out and buy more things in case the bed failed to arrive. In my defense, I did not go out and buy a bunch of plastic junk. I bought some engineering toys, puzzles, games, and a couple Barbies (plastic junk). On Christmas morning, Lula had a couch full of presents, some wrapped, some laid out in special Santa-delivery fashion.
That day, she and I went out into the yard to play with her new rocket launcher toy, one of those where you jump on an air-filled pad to launch a styrofoam rocket high into the blue sky. We launched rockets for maybe ten minutes before Lula found an old ball in the yard and asked if I wanted to play baseball. We couldn’t locate the bat so we played catch for a while. After catch, she asked if I would rake the leaves in our front yard into a big pile so she could run and jump in them. Her face lit up when I pulled the rake out of the shed. It was Christmas morning all over again!
The leaf jumping turned out to be highlight of the day. I raked the pile higher and higher, over and over, and Lula seemed to get more excited with every turn. She never asked about the bed even though we did explain to her that there had been some shipping issues and that the bed would eventually arrive. She didn’t seem to care. All of the panic-gifts I had purchased a couple days prior sat on the couch in their boxes. Six days later, after several rounds of leaf jumping (before the rain came), 90% of her Christmas toys are still where they were Christmas morning, occupying one of the couches in the living room. Maybe that says something about the gift buyer.
Considering that most of natural history was defined by scarcity, by ecosystem carrying capacities before the advent of farming, it is no mystery as to why we want to gather and accumulate goods, no wonder why we define success primarily in monetary terms, and no wonder why some people go crazy at Christmas. I felt it too when Lula’s bed had not arrived — a bolt of lightning through my lizard brain. I did not really think much about it — I went out into the asphalt parking lots like I was headed into the grassland with spear in hand. But why? I’ve always been okay with fewer things. What happened to me? I know that true wealth is within, that spiritual stock is worth more than worldly stock. I do not build up storehouses of grain — unless the storehouses are for my daughter. So there is the rub. I have found a way to move myself beyond materialism — truthfully, I could manage living in a tent — but when it comes to her, this evolutionary impulse for her to have gifts under the tree, even if they are gifts she will ultimately ignore, is strong.
Consumerism and materialism are not only the death machines of the biosphere; they represent the death of meaning. There was a time when holidays were tied to the cycles of nature and so, they were celebrations and collective recognitions of the turning of seasons — the harvest, the slumber and death of the living world, the return of fertility and light. In ancient times, these cycles held real implications; the acknowledgment of these cycles must have actually been felt by people living through them. Although we still obviously experience natural cycles, most people are less subjected to nature these days in general and rely more or artificial environments and methods of sustaining life that aren’t necessarily tethered to the natural world, to seasonal farming for instance. You can get a tomato at the grocery store anytime of year. That tomato might taste like cardboard, but still, it’s there. The implications of getting fruit out of season are radical.
Our modern religions and philosophies are reflections of this kind of detachment from the natural world and from meaning — more abstract in their constructions, far less grounded than the nature religions and philosophies of old. We’ve built a civilization that seems to tell us that the resources needed for continued building are limitless — that we can do and have anything we dream. It is no wonder that postmodernism sees us as wasteful, oppressive creatures ruled by abstractions that ultimately have little value except that which we prescribe to them. That is what we’ve become. Our religions are guilty of pushing the doctrines of other, better worlds. Who cares about this shithole when there is a perfect place waiting? I have very rarely heard religious folks speak about the fact that Genesis frames the earth as the perfect paradise created by God for humans to manage. The story of our lost innocence to me represents our lost connection to nature (and so, to God). We could easily replace the word dominion with the word stewardship for a less than egoic view of what we are meant to do here. How, after all, do we know that this is not heaven?
The so-called pagan traditions of pre-Christian Europe seem much richer and more meaningful than our own. That’s not to claim that there is no meaning in the Jesus story — that story abounds with vital messages and metaphoric quality. There is some reason to believe that when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, he wasn’t talking about a place beyond the earth (see Luke 17:21 where Jesus assures the disciples that the Kingdom is “within you”). When I was a child, before I got to open a mound of gifts at my grandma’s house, she would make me read and talk about the meaning of the nativity story. That is an experience that stuck with me even if it is kind of like asking a crackhead to think about the value of sobriety right before allowing him to take a hit.
The true marker of meaning in my life has been my connection to nature, which for me is both as real as real can be but also the source of all spirituality and philosophy in my abstract mind. Nature is both concrete and airy. It is both ephemeral and constant. It is at once dead and spirit-filled. It is all dichotomy and all singularity — there can be no greater metaphor. I don’t need to dream of the next world or to imagine unseen forces at work — what of these forces? For that reason I am looking to the past to ground myself in traditions that seem more real, more connected to what I cherish and recognize in nature. I want to go forward honoring the changes of seasons in ceremonial ways even if there is no one there to do it with me. And gradually, I want to ignore modern holidays. When people ask why, I will say it’s against my religion.
Compared with modern Christmas, which has become a holiday that represents an acceleration of conventional western consumerism, disregarding symbolic meaning in favor of stuff, ancient solstice celebrations were much more nuanced, natural, and meaningful. Winter solstice across ancient Europe represented a time of social catharsis, when the normal rules of society no longer applied, when people turned toward nature in reverence and gratitude for natural gifts, paid homage to their ancestors, and got a little wacky around the bonfire. These holidays were also often defined by excess, usually in the form of community fellowship, as in the ancient tradition of Yule, or Jol, where for 12 nights large fires were lit in honor and remembrance of the sun on the darkest nights of the year, and where large feasts of roasted goose, mulled wine, gingerbread, spiced cakes, root vegetables, winter squashes, cooked apples and pears, and pickles were laid out at community tables. Celebrations included Yule hams, associated with the Norse God Freyr, God of peace and fertility, for at the root of this celebration was the understanding that the community must feast as a way to nourish themselves, to preserve life through the harshest of seasons so that life might re-emerge gradually as the light of the sun brought on spring.
Just imagine our children understanding the cycle of seasons and life itself on those terms. How brutal is nature but how much more rich could our lives be when we know it and honor it? When we are familiar with it and connected to it. Isn’t it clear that our modern depression is related to our detachment from nature, from traditions as rich as these, and from one another? But how do we get back there? These traditions took place when times were leaner and more cruel, closer to the bone and sweeter. When times were more cruel, when times were simpler, it has been said, life was more enjoyable, more fun, more real. Toward the end of Yule was a night called Mother’s Night, in which all mothers as well as our ancestral mothers, quite literally the anchors and nurturers of human life, were honored. We might imagine broadening Mother’s Night celebration to include a ceremony for the Great Mother, called Nature, the mother of us all.
This theme of returning to wildness, and of the rejection of social conventions, ran through various solstice celebrations in the ancient world. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, seven nights of revelry that ended in the Brumalia on December 25th, honoring the Roman God of Agriculture, Saturn, and paying homage to a time before the development of law and social hierarchy, a time of wild innocence. This is related in turn to the Greek God Dionysus, whose birth was also venerated on December 25th during the festival called Bacchanalia. Dionysus, according to legend, emerged to walk and feast among mortals during this time of year, bringing with him with an orgiastic fervor, a reverence toward primal instinct.
I acknowledge these traditions without getting too much into the details surrounding them to ask a question. What if modern Christmas was time set aside to return to wildness, to honor our primal needs of feasting and fertility, rather than a time to advance capitalistic interests, which I believe ultimately depress our spirit. I suppose then we would have to take Christ back out of Christmas? Even though, as it was stated earlier, Christ himself was vehemently opposed to the worship of materialism. If Christmastime was truly a time of honoring the rebel known as Jesus, I could get with that. But it isn’t — we bow down not to any god this time of year but to the god of trouble, perhaps otherwise known as Satan (same letters as Santa). It is easy to see, symbolically, why the Catholic Church borrowed December 25th from the pagans so long ago. Christ is the light of the world, the return of the son (sun), the warmth of the planet, the reason for the season.
Of course, some pagan traditions have made their way into our modern holidays, and for that, I am always grateful. The feasting, for one. The booze, the gifts, the decorating of trees, but have we forgotten completely the meaning of these traditions? It is my hope that we would remember. Without getting too much into it, there is some evidence that many traditions surrounding Santa Claus come to us from the ancient artic shamans of northern Europe, who dressed in red, totted around sacks of dried psychedelic mushrooms, the sacred amanita muscaria, adorning evergreen trees with them, and dropping them down chimneys as gifts. The very colors of the season, green and red, could come from the fact that amanitas grow at the base of evergreens; their heads shine like presents under the tree; reindeer eat them and “fly.” It is my hope, friends, that we remember.
January 1st is the new year because the Romans said it was. Janus is the Roman God of Beginnings. Why should we care about what Rome said? They were the brutalizers of many of our ancestors — European, Jewish, Arabic, and African alike. They were the America of their time, the great crushing machine drunk on power. Who the fuck is Janus but a long-dead idea? If I make resolutions, I will do it throughout the year as I please. But my new year shall come in the spring, when the ancient egg-laying hare comes round, hiding eggs soaked in the blood of sacrifice. When the world wakes up and returns to making babies, when the flowers begin to bloom and when the spirit of life returns to the warmed earth.
Excellent, I agree with your sentiments. The presents I received this Christmas were: books, soap, chocolates, a charitable donation in my name and more books. One of the most memorable gifts I've ever been given was a jar of homemade jam.
You are most welcome, James. I am delighted to introduce you to Brigid’s Cross... and guess what? It’s been dreadful wind, rain and chills here in Oregon + other life events... which have precluded me from making my crosses “on time” but we do our best! I am putting the crosses I made last year in the fire this evening with some prayers for steadfast resilience amidst the unfolding chaos. May the beauty of Nature and Brigid’s midwinter fire inspire and light our way.