HOLIDAZE

This is going to be weird.

Christmas, I mean. We successfully navigated Thanksgiving without succumbing to pressure to bow heads in a public prayer, even if our inner voices did mumble gratitude to the ethereal unknown.

But Christmas...yeesh, this is going to be weird.

First and foremost is the question that hovers over so many of our days: But what do we tell the children? When we watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and Linus starts quoting scripture, do we just go with the flow or explain to them that Charles Schulz abandoned Christianity late in life, identifying himself as a "secular humanist," which is also a term you could pin on mommy and daddy? Should we do like our pagan friends and go to extreme effort to create distinctions between what we're celebrating (they choose Yule)? In the end, I guess, Christmas is a secular holiday unless you know better, so we're probably safe just making sure the kids don't know better.

But we know better, their mom and I. For me, Christmas has always been drowned in religion, from the church Christmas programs that my own mother sunk countless hours into, sitting on an organ bench for choir and orchestra practices, to the "pray in the new year" services that we attended every New Year's Eve. And, in recent years, my little family and I were involved in a faith-based community that did beautiful, candlelit Christmas worship services.

When you're looking for meaning in the holidays, eschewing religious overtones but unwilling to fully embrace the rampant consumerism that (anymore) starts the day after Halloween, the notion of "family" really steps to center stage. That's something that those living Christmas tree programs at the Baptist church robbed my family of when I was a kid--my mom was gone for much of the holiday season, practicing organ parts while my dad, sister, and I sat at home eating casserole and watching "Hart to Hart."

So I guess we'll get by just fine, so long as we keep drinking eggnog with the kids and waking them up to watch Christmas specials under a big comforter with us.


I'm on a bit of a bittersweet nostalgia jag right now, though, and the holidays certainly intensify that. I've been remembering my grandparents--the way my grandma, a jolly, white-haired widow from Eastern Kentucky, would greet us with "How do?" when we walked into her house for the Wilson Christmas; how my maternal family Christmases would find a roomful of cousins, aunts, uncles, and various strangers singing hymns and Christmas carols to the accompaniment of piano, guitar, dulcimers (both the slide kind that's not really a dulcimer and the large hammer dulcimer that most definitely is), and, in later years, my uncle's upright bass. It wasn't perfect, and I've learned just how very imperfect it all was in the years since I've been old enough to add alcohol to my personal holiday traditions, but it was nice and it's a shame it all went to hell before my kids were able to experience it.