Making Peace With Christmas & Solstice

In which I address steps that have helped to make this holiday season the best in years.

Since leaving Christianity I have struggled with how and whether to celebrate Christmas.  It felt false to cherry-pick parts of a Christian holiday while rejecting Christianity itself.  On the other hand, I did not want to cause further division in my family by refusing to participate, nor did I want to force my kids to be those weird kids whose mom won’t let them do Christmas.  I like Christmas and I wanted to keep it, but I always felt a little inauthentic about it.

As a humanist science nerd and a dabbler in paganism, I love the Winter Solstice.   The trouble is no one in my family celebrates the Solstice or has the slightest interest in changing the date of our winter celebration.  Every year when December 21 passed, mostly unobserved, it felt like I was neglecting something important, or missing out.

All of the pieces of this change have been in my head for years, but this year they clicked in way that is meaningful for me.  Christmas is the way my culture celebrates the Winter Solstice.  For me, that is it. It may be a few days late, due to a calendar clash, but that is far from the strangest thing about western euro-american culture.  This may be a big "duh" to you, but sometimes it takes a while between when you know something is true and when you feel its truth. When you look at the history of winter festivals, you can come away with a feeling that Christmas is somewhat false, but this year something has turned and it feels more universal.  I am not going to begrudge literalist Christians their refusal to see how much of their sacred day is borrowed from older traditions, but I won't let them interfere with my understanding of its history either.  Instead I will just view Christmas as one aspect in a web of winter holidays.  I will celebrate the Solstice on December 25 and call it Christmas.  The actual story of Christ's birth is not spiritually significant for me, but the long darkness and the reborn sun are. If I focus on joy and peace and warmth and beauty in winter, who cares if it is a few days late? This is Christmas and Solstice on my terms, and I don't feel like I am fighting either one of them anymore.

The second change I have made this year is in my expectation for my own performance on Christmas.  Our kids are getting older and understand why financially this will be a smaller Christmas than normal. Knowing that I will not be able to provide everything I want to freed me from feeling like I have to make the BEST. CHRISTMAS. EVER! every year. I am focusing on spending time instead of money.  This means watching Dr. Who Christmas specials with Tall Daughter E and cutting paper snowflakes with Tiny Daughter M.  It is hot cider with Husband S late on Christmas Eve and learning to knit gifts.  It means very little time spent Christmas shopping.

This Christmas is important.  It is the last Christmas when all my kids will be children.  It is the last one where I know for sure that the whole family will live together and race together down the hallway Christmas morning.  I hope Tall E is with us next Christmas, but she will be an adult then, and it is possible she will be living somewhere else.  I want to wrap my arms around this Christmas and hug it.

Yesterday I had a very frustrating afternoon and what should have been a vexing evening.  But as I killed time running errands and walking in the beautiful falling snow, I stared pondering this post and found myself so in love with the world, so happy not to be a neurotic mess.   I am not totally sure why I find myself calmer and less frantic this holiday season, but I am.  I find myself honoring the stillness of the season more than the joyous frenzy. I want to rest and dwell in this Christmas.  To everyone reading this, I sincerely wish a wonderful joyous and peaceful holiday, on whatever terms you choose to celebrate it.

Of Beautiful Brides and Broken Mothers

Life got pretty crazy around here last week. I am hoping to catch up on a couple of blog posts I wanted to write, but we will see what my chaos level is by the end of the week. Last week was a big mishmash of joy and frustration. My BFF got married this weekend and that has kept me very busy, but very happy.

On a similar note, congratulations to all the same sex couple in New York state who can now make themselves as stressed out, and crazy, and ridiculously happy at their own weddings as the one we just had up here.

I knew the week was going to be busy, but I didn’t expect the week’s other complication – my mother broke her ankle while my dad was out of town. This part has not been fun. If you have been reading this blog for a while you know that things between my mother and I are loving, but strained. Neither one of us is really real around the other. Since both of my sisters live in the Lower 48, I am the only child around to help her. Mom is a very smart woman who is very good at many things – accepting help and feeling powerless are not among them. Her frustration manifests as irrational stubbornness. I believe this week is referred to as “character building.”

One afternoon I was at her house, vacuuming for her and helping her to make her home a little more wheelchair-friendly and it struck me that I was looking at my future. There I was, vacuuming the same hall where I had done so many times growing up and I realized that dealing with her while she deals with her diminishing physical capability is around the corner. My sisters and their kids all live a plane-ride away and my father has serious health problems. Mom is going to get older and angry at her aging, and I will be taking care of her. This future scares the shit out of me.

My most awesome and wonderful Husband S deserves a special note of appreciation. He dealt with a nervous bride, a cranky mother-in-law, his visiting mother, and me while I was stressed out with all of them. He never complained or batted an eye. He is my rock and I don’t know what I would do without his support.

Confessions of an Easter Crank

As requested by the lovely lady from Texas in one of her guises of @TheMissionalist, here are my thoughts on why I was glad to be done with Easter yesterday evening.

1. Sick kid who really wanted to have a fun Easter, but was feeling lousy – not much fun.
2. Family. Many people share my feelings about family and holidays. It can be difficult, especially in theologically diverse families. I am not the only one who has that one relative who makes every gathering a chore to endure, but I do have one. That one special person who makes you smile though gritted teeth and think to yourself that you really do uphold the worth and dignity of EVERY person regardless of how you are feeling at the moment. My feeling is that you have the opportunity to contribute and the right to criticize, but you can’t have just the latter. (Letting out that deep breath now.)

Now, for the theology. I’ve written about this before, but Easter as a holiday is meaningless for me. As a non-theist, I don’t celebrate the risen Christ. Participating in Easter festivities makes me feel dishonest and I hate being dishonest with people. My family of origin believes in the literal resurrection story so I know that the remembrance and celebration of said story holds significant meaning for them. For me, it means extra shopping and cooking I have to do. I guess it just tugs me back to feeling like I have to pretend to have a faith I don’t have in order to make them happy, and I won’t do that anymore. I don’t want to be disrespectful to their faith, but I can’t share it with them either.

Being post-Christian, I don’t like the whole Easter story. The theme of re-birth and renewal is lost on me because what I see is a celebration that your leader was tortured to death. That is not so festive for me. When I was a conservative Christian, Easter had meaning: Christ’s sacrifice bought my eternal life. But if you don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus and you don’t believe in penal substitution, then what is the whole point? Without a literal resurrection Easter just seems gory.

Sarah at Ernie Bufflo writes here about what Good Friday means to her as a liberal Christian so I know that there are other ways to view Easter from a liberal perspective. I recommend her post if you want a more uplifting version of Holy Week than mine. I guess I could sum this whole post up by saying that I would be happy to ignore Easter altogether and wish the faithful well as I do with many holidays that are not part of my faith tradition, but celebrating it part of the way, without any faith behind it feels wrong.

Enabling Evangelicals

I earned some daughter points this week.

Through my work, I was able to get two tickets for my parents to attend a major evangelical Christian event next month. They are excited. They are disappointed that I will not be attending the event with them, but still, they are happy to be going.

I struggled with this a little bit. My initial reaction when a co-worker suggested I invite my parents was that I did not want to support something so totally antithetical to my personal views. Giving them the tickets felt like giving the event my blessing and I don’t want to do that. After thinking it over for a few minutes I changed my mind. I am not paying for these tickets; my company has already purchased them and someone is going to use them. Letting someone else use the tickets would not mean that the message would not be getting out. I am not encouraging my parents’ beliefs because they are not going to change them whether or not they attend.

Giving my parents the tickets will A) make them happy and B) show the respect for their beliefs that I would like for myself. In truth, I bear a fair amount of hostility toward their belief system, but I respect their right to worship as they please. I can’t really expect them to extend that respect to me if I am unwilling to give it to them.

This occasion does present the danger that my co-workers will be spending time with my parents, unsupervised – a chilling thought. I’ll have to take that risk.

Making Peace and a Non-theist's Samhain

This year, due to a family obligation, I will not be able to attend our women’s circle Samhain celebration. Knowing that I am going to miss out of that has me thinking about the holiday ahead of time as I look for my own way to observe it.

Recently, Heather at Nagoonberry and I have been talking about the things we miss about theism. There is comfort in many theistic beliefs and I sometimes miss them even if I don’t believe their underpinnings are true. Normally, I think about the things I miss about Christian practice, but in reading articles on Samhain, there is something else I almost wish I believed.
Many theistic Pagans will use this Sunday as an opportunity to reach out to their ancestors and their beloved dead. It is a beautiful idea, really. The problem is I do not believe in any type of afterlife that involves spirits waiting to be summoned. In fact, I am extremely skeptical about any afterlife at all, but I am a little jealous of those who take comfort from this day.

Reading about how some Pagans experienced Samhain, I got to thinking about my maternal grandmother and how I wish I could make peace with her. I am her namesake and she died just a few years before I was born. It is strange that I was the one to get her name as our personalities couldn’t be more different. From all accounts she was a gentle and loving saint of a woman, but she was very sad. She provided love for her children while struggling with the family depression her whole adult life, and her premature death cast a pall over her children. She has been dead for 40 years and none of them can discuss her without something changing and dampening in them. It is like the guilt suppresses their spark. I have always felt like I could never really understand my mother and who she is or my relationship with her without knowing more about my grandmother and why no one in the family has ever gotten over her death.

Most of the time I am a happy non-theist. The world is so filled with wonder it can satisfy curious seekers for far more than a lifetime. Sometime, though, sometimes I wish I could cast a circle and find peace with someone whose memory haunts me even though we never met. Whatever I end up doing this Samhain, I will dedicate it to the memory of my grandmother.

Out of the UU Closet

Well, frak.

I guess I am out now as a UU to my family. Here is the story. Since I informed my mother that I would no longer be attending church with them a few years ago, my family and I never discuss religion. In the past they politely invited me to various church events and I politely declined. It is the one subject we discuss even less often than politics and it sometimes hangs there in the air while none of us acknowledge it in our WASPy way. I know that my rejection of her religion and refusal to bring up my daughters in it is very painful for my mother. I wish there was some way around that, but there isn't. She did every thing she could to bring me up in a godly manner and it didn't work. My father sometimes worked two jobs so that my middle sister and I could go to Christian school, and still I left the flock. She is respectful enough of my choices not to browbeat me with that disappointment, but it is still there, obvious and unaddressed.

I am not ashamed of any of my spiritual beliefs, but I don't bring them up with the family because I believe it will just cause more pain. My personal beliefs are not any of their business. However, when my mother informs my daughter that she cannot have a trinket featuring a peace symbols because it is satanic - it can be tough.

The AUUF is starting an official Facebook page and I have volunteered to keep it up to date. This requires me to "like" the page. My personal Facebook page doesn't have a lot of details for reasons such as these. I figure if you know me, then you know I love the Beatles and Dune without me having to make it part of my profile.

So now my extremely devout Baptist sister is requesting an explanation about why I would "like" something like the Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. I guess being a "backslider" and skipping church was one thing, but at least I wasn't an out-and-out heathen. (Not the Odin & Freya kind of heathen, but more like the totally misguided and much to be pitied fallen one in need of rescue.)

I think I am going to ignore this request as Facebook does not seem like the best place to discuss theology. If she cares enough she will call. I love my sister, but she lives 3,000 miles away from me and has for over half my life. My choice of house of worship is not her business. If my family chooses to gossip about my fallen state, well, that won't be any worse than when I was 20 years old, single, and pregnant.

Thanks, blogosphere, for helping me to work some of this out. I feel a little better. The point of this blog was for me to chronicle my journey to UU and the experience of a new member. I guess this had to be one of the chapters eventually. Still, I am not looking forward to that phone call.

Demographics and Multiracial Americans

The Huffington Post posted this article about the latest demographic numbers and America's path to becoming a minority-White nation. It is mostly information that we have all heard before, but what caught my eye was that multiracial is the largest growing demographic in the United States, I assume, it is growing fast than even Latinos.

Does this bode good news for race relations? With a growing number of people who belong to different ethnicities or who have family members of different ethnicities will we see an increase in acceptance of differences? Studies show that people with gay family members are much less likely to discriminate against gays; does it work the same for racial issues? Do you stop seeing other races as “the other” if your grandchildren belong to their race as well as yours? It is very easy to dislike or fear those lousy, no good, fill-in-the-blanks, but it is much harder to hate your nephew, or sister-in-law, or cousin.

Maybe I am hanging a lot on very little data, but made me hopeful for our future.

Belated Birthday Gift

My father just showed up with the most awesome belated birthday gift: a bb gun.

As a child, I was a total tomboy and obsessed with cowboys. I wanted a bb gun more than almost anything in the world, except for maybe a horse, and Star Wars toys too but you get the point. My mother did not allow even toy guns in the house because they were violent. My nephew is 12 years younger than me and when I was a teenager my parents BOUGHT HIM A BB GUN! You can imagine my outrage, my teenaged assurance that life was TOTALLY UNFAIR.

I may have brought this story up a few hundred times in the last 20 or so years. So today, my father presented me with my very own bb gun. I don't think I will actually use it as much as my 9-year old self would have, but I love his sense of humor. As a footnote, my mother still thinks this is a stupid gift. Sometimes you just gotta' love your family.

In Honor of Awesome Day

To honor Chalicechick's holiday of Awesome Day, I would like to celebrate the following fact: yesterday on August 16, 2009 I found my most favorite sleeveless summer weight sweater that has been missing since I moved over a year ago in Tiny Daughter M's closet. I mean, I LOVE this sweater.

I am wearing said sweater today and I feel awesome in it. Yay for getting rid of her too small clothes.

In other yesterday news, we played Rock Band with my sister-in-law and her boyfriend who are visiting and much fun was had. We haven't seen her in a long time and we miss her. The boyfriend got to see a moose which blew his mind and our good friend The Comic Book Guy sings a version of "Master Exploder" more awesome than we deserve.