Alternative Christmas
Mon Jul 23, 2007 at 10:50:59 AM PDT
I know, I know, it's JULY.
So why am I already thinking about this? Well, last Christmas was a complete and total fiasco for my family, who run the small spectrum from adamant athiest to undeclared. We are all environmentalists and powerfully repulsed by the overarching Southern Baptist culture down here -- my parents run the only organic farm in a 100 mile radius and I'm a wetlands researcher-- but having grown up without alternative ritual we were just totally unprepared for the Great Christmas Collapse of 2006. It came with stress, crying, guilt over having spent too much money, etc. I got so worked up we thought I must be pregnant (I wasn't).
So we're having a dinner to make plans to fix it, and I need your advice.
The thing is, we all LOVE christmas. We love giving gifts, cooking food, and of course the music, since we are all professional musicians to one degree or another. It's just that all the hypocrisy we have to ignore to sing convincingly about Jesus has reached a fever pitch, and this year the singing just turned into a pitiful dirge. Nobody's heart was in it.
Some fixes are clear: we should carol, but restrict it to the least christian songs we can find (snowmen, santa, maybe holly and the ivy). We should plant something and fill some birdfeeders. We should volunteer to help a needy family (we've done this before, but not last year). We should not try to cook for 30 people while opening towers of presents, causing my dad to literally throw gifts at people and bark at them to hurry up and open them. We, um, should not actually buy/make towers of presents.
Instilling a sense of ritual for the ritual-impaired is less clear. I know that there are some books about this out there, nonchristian mealtime blessings, solstice celebration ideas that are good for environmentalists, that kind of thing, but I'm having trouble finding them. I seem to remember a similar discussion here at some point. Any ideas?
