For most of my life, I have not preferred Christmas. Most people find this curious, if not alarming—and maybe even unchristian. But I believe at least a few of you agree with me. You just may not know that you are allowed to.
Hear me out.
We are all told colorful lights and hot cocoa are quaint and cozy, but we only need lights and cocoa because it has become dark and cold. And though onyx and ice may indeed have something spiritual to offer us, we are allowed to feel sad when artificial fixtures and corded blankets are doing the jobs the sun once did—and that we pray it will one day do again.
We are told the holiday season is about merriment with our families. But families, as a rule, are at least as crabby as they are merry. They have an enraging way of being simultaneously stagnant when we wish for resurrection, and evolving when we long for stability.
We are promised rest for the weary at the end of what has almost certainly been a long, hard year for someone in our lives. But it seems even those of us privileged enough to have time off from our paid labor are then asked to spend this one wild and precious life hot-gluing popsicle-stick nativities, searching for gifts we cannot afford, and taking trip after trip to the grocery store for one forgotten herb after another.
And these are just my silly complaints—to say nothing of the years we are celebrating for the first time without one of the loves of our life, or the many years we are forced to celebrate with the people who have hurt us the most. I think it’s okay to dislike the darkness and coldness that surround Christmas. I think it’s okay to trust what our bodies are telling us about what—and who—we desire and don’t desire.
And also…
I’ve been trying something a bit different recently. I wrote a poem a few years ago that was published in a journal called Apricity. I had never heard the word before, but I was delighted to learn that it is an old-timey term for “the warmth of the sun in winter.”
And just knowing that someone, at some point in history, imagined this word made me feel immediately less alone in the world.
Maybe I am just a late bloomer and you all knew this all along. Still, I started to see that perhaps this is what Christmas is supposed to be—not a time of year when we ignore all that is bloody and violent, sterile and unbearable in the big, terrifying world out there (not to mention within our own homes and bodies), but rather a time when we remember to look for signs of salvation amid all the cruelty we endure as the fee for being human.
Here are a few rays of sunshine that have warmed my versions of Christmas throughout the years. They won’t all work for everyone every day, because we live in community and don’t get our way all the time. We also don’t all feel soothed by the same soothers.
Still, this is just my version of a permission list for those who feel chilly at the close of the year and who would like to give something else a whirl:
- Making lists of all my favorites from the year (movies, television, podcasts, books, trips, comedy specials)
- Reading All Creation Waits and at least one Babysitter’s Club Book
- Dressing up and feeling fancy when I want to
- Wearing what I woke up in if I want to
- Not decorating if I don’t like decorating (people who want it can do it!)
- Decorating if I like decorating (people who don’t like it don’t have to)
- Choosing who is “family” this year and not letting others downplay or disregard how I have defined this fraught concept
- Re-evaluating traditions each year to see if and who they are working for
- Crying when tears are the truth of it
- Laughing long and hard with the people that make me laugh longest and hardest
- Eating and eating, and eating some more.
- Rejecting any voice that suggests I should spend one minute of Christmas counting a calorie, running a race, or apologizing for the year’s weight gain, or loss, or maintenance.
- Going on a walk if, for me, to walk is to feel the warmth of the sun in winter
And though it still sort of pains my little grinchy heart to admit it, yes, maybe stringing lights and sipping chocolate can be ways of insisting to one another and to ourselves that even when the heavens (or parts of humanity) seem to have run out of light, and of warmth, we will keep finding ways to conjure it for ourselves.
Merry Christmas Everyone.
Stay Warm.
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Kerri Fisher is Clinical Associate Professor and the Associate Dean for Community and Action at Baylor University’s Diana R. Garland School of Social Work.
