Scarred for life ...a Christmas story

By this point, many of you of you may have realized that Kevin and I are different. We are not different in a bad way, or different from the entire rest of the world. We are just a little bit less mainstream than other people. We have tried to share this little by little with many of you (at our wedding, at Harry's Wiccaning...)but I suspect some of you thought we might change once we had a baby at holiday time, that we might "grow out of it." Naturally, some of the questions we get this time of year from the most well-meaning of people include:

• Did you take Harry to see Santa?
• Did you guys put up your tree yet?
• What did you get Harry for Christmas?

I know my dad thinks that Harry will be scarred for life, but we chose not to force our 8 month old to wait in a long line full of runny noses to have his picture taken with the scary giant elf in the bright red suit. It is true, we will not have a picture to compare to the one of me at 12 months, screaming my head off as I sat on the giant elf's lap, my face matching his suit. Also, we figured it might confuse the little guy to sit on his lap and then not receive any gifts from him...Although, I suspect my little elf of a father is out hunting for red suits now. In response to "what if Santa visits Harry at my house?"---well, we have already explained to Harry that we head to New Jersey at Christmas to experience other cultures. Maybe he will grow up to be an anthropologist! :-)

As for the tree...Well, my official take on this (for as long as Kevin will leave it posted) is that I am against the senseless slaughter of innocent trees or the representation thereof. I cringe each year when I see them laying in the gutter every January 2nd, like so many dead bodies. It is just too sad! Kevin does not feel this strongly about it, but is happy not to have to deal with the mess. We will, however, put lights up to celebrate the longest night of the year and the return of the sun. And, if I can find one, there will be a yule log. We are not Grinches or Scrooges, we are just not Christian. Plus, we have a small home and we are not in it for the majority of the holiday season. (I secretly still like to lok at the pretty trees all decorated though...shhhh!)

Okay, I hear gasps already when responding to this one: we are not getting Harry anything for Christmas. Harry has plenty of things. Kevin and I also do not exchange gifts. This may really confuse those of you who received your holiday cards from us on December 1st! We think the holidays are about seeing our freinds and spending time with family. I like to buy what I hope are menaingful gifts that people do not expect to receive. Something that makes people happy. After many selfish years of being miserable over gifts that I did not like, and pouting that people didn't care or didn't know me well enough, I decided to turn things around and be more excited about buying gifts for other people. This does not mean we don't like gifts! We just want to teach Harry more about the spirit of giving, and making memories that are important. When you think back on holidays past, it is not usually the gifts that matter, but being together and reflecting on the memories of the past year. We will still make sure the holidays are magical for Harry. And he will still have the tooth fairy (of course half of his sale will have to go towards charity).

Instead of buying gifts for each other, Kevin and I exchange "the can." This will be our 9th year of exchanging our gift can, which is really just an old popcorn tin. Inside we put one item that represents something from the past year. It is something that we did not buy for the can, but that we held onto. One year Kevin had to go back to his mechanic and actually dig through the vacuum for a red lobster pick! That summer we had driven to New England to eat lobster at picnic tables, something I had never done before. So, each year we get to reflect on our most memorable event of the year. This year, Harry will have his own can. I have been saving his little mittened T-shirt from the hospital just for the occasion!

CHRISTMAS IS MORE THAN JUST PRESENTS

Kevin and I hope to teach Harry that the holidays aren't about presents. However, we understand this might be a challenge. We know this is the harder path for us to follow. We know he will receive many presents, and we know there will be talk of Santa. We will not be the first to deal with these questions. We just want Harry to associate the holidays with family, traditions, and charity, and not with lots and lots of presents. We hope that by focusing on family traditions now, it will be the special moments, and not the material things, that Harry looks forward to most each holiday season.

On the Sesame Street newsletter that I receive in my inbox, I came across an article entitled The Best Gift My Parents Ever Gave Me...
Here is an excerpt:

Famous people share their favorite gifts.A handmade sweater. A dreamed-of bike. An attitude to take through life. Decades later, we still remember gifts like these. When we asked famous people to share with us the most precious gift they ever received from their families, they offered these warm, funny, and inspiring responses. And now we offer them as a gift to you.

Derek JeterShortstop for the New York Yankees
My parents have given me support throughout my life. Knowing that your family supports your dreams gives you reassurance when you're trying to reach your goals.

Jan and Stan BerenstainCreators of the classic Berenstain Bears book series
Stan: I was given a set of six novels by Horatio Alger for Christmas. I was 7 years old and the gift was special because I was already an avid reader. The stories were about the achievement of success against great odds. The two titles I remember were Strive and Succeed and Sink or Swim. They gave me a sense of possibility and great hope, given that we were in the midst of the Great Depression.
Jan: My parents gave me a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. Although I couldn't read, I was so inspired by the illustrations that I learned to read all the verses by the end of first grade (and to draw pictures, too).

Bob McGrath"Bob" on Sesame Street
The best gift my parents ever gave me was their sense of fun and lightheartedness. Even though money was short on the Illinois farm where I grew up in the thirties, creativity was plentiful. My parents invented wonderful adventures for their five children. They would leave Easter bunny footprints all over the windowsill or knock a fence down on Christmas Eve and blame it on Santa's sleigh. My parents taught us not to rely on material things to be happy. They taught us how to be content in just being together.

Bill Nye
The Science Guy on PBSI got a red Schwinn bicycle for Christmas when I was 11. It was great because I didn't expect it! In giving it to me, my parents let me know that they realized I was getting older and that they were proud of me.

George W. Bush
The best gift my parents ever gave me was the gift of unconditional love. Mother and Dad raised five children. Yet despite the daily demands of five little egos and energies competing for their time and attention, they always let us know that, first and foremost, we were the most important people in their lives.No job, no title, mattered more to them than being a good mom and dad to each of us. Even when Dad became president of the United States, he was never too busy to take a call from one of his children. Their consistent message was: You can be anything you want to be if you aim high and work hard. They encouraged us to strive to be good and decent people, to set goals and to work to achieve them, and to help make a difference in the world.Over the years my parents have given me many material things, but the gift that endures is one that was free: their unconditional love.

Cheryl Henson
Vice President of the Jim Henson Company
For my third birthday my father built a dollhouse that looked like the house where we lived in a 300-year-old farmhouse. I loved that gift because my father made it himself. It was cool having a house for our dolls that so closely resembled our own house. My sister Lisa and I played with our favorite dolls in that dollhouse. My father made a film for Sesame Street featuring the dollhouse and the number 2. The film included two little girls, two little dolls, and two little cats in a little dollhouse.

As for explaining the tree, here is one story we can tell Harry while he is young, and hopefully he will understand that it is better to experience nature in his true form:

Once upon a time, there was a Baby Bear, a Mama Bear, and a Daddy Bear. They lived in a beautiful forest. In the middle of their forest there was a meadow with a tiny old cottage. Baby Bear loved to go look into the window of the cottage, for there were always beautiful, magical things to see and smell in the cottage.
One cold snowy evening, Baby Bear looked into the cottage window and he saw the most amazing thing he had ever seen. It was a short, fat little pine tree that sparkled with red, blue, and gold. It was covered in candles and strands of cranberries,popcorn, and cinnamon sticks.
Baby Bear ran home to Mama and Daddy Bear, and told them all about what he had seen. The next day, the family of bears decided to make their own Yule tree in the forest. They searched and searched until they found the perfect short, fat little pine tree.They worked hard gathering berries and moss, pine cones, and nuts. They hung the berries, pinecones, moss, and nuts on their Yule tree. When they finished decorating the little pine tree in the forest, they stood back to take a good look. Baby Bear said, "It's not sparkling like the one in the cottage."
The Bears were disappointed. They all went to bed feeling a bit sad. They cuddled together and slept through the long, cold, dark night.
The next morning when they woke up, Baby Bear ran to his little Yule tree in the forest. It was sparkling! There were icicles hanging from the needles of the tree and the morning sun shining on the icicles sent out rays of sunshine everywhere. All the animals in the forest came to admire Baby Bear's Beautiful little Yule tree. Baby Bear said, "Let's all have a feast!"
So they feasted on the delicious nuts and berries from Baby Bear's Yule tree. The End.


I will leave you with one final article:

Midwinter's Eve:YULE
by Mike Nichols

Our Christian friends are often quite surprised at how enthusiastically we Pagans celebrate the 'Christmas' season. Even though we prefer to use the word 'Yule', and our celebrations may peak a few days before the 25th, we nonetheless follow many of the traditional customs of the season: decorated trees, carolling, presents, Yule logs, and mistletoe. We might even go so far as putting up a 'Nativity set', though for us the three central characters are likely to be interpreted as Mother Nature, Father Time, and the Baby Sun-God. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who knows the true history of the holiday, of course.
In fact, if truth be known, the holiday of Christmas has always been more Pagan than Christian, with it's associations of Nordic divination, Celtic fertility rites, and Roman Mithraism. That is why John Calvin and other leaders of the Reformation abhorred it, why the Puritans refused to acknowledge it, much less celebrate it (to them, no day of the year could be more holy than the Sabbath), and why it was even made illegal in Boston! The holiday was already too closely associated with the birth of older Pagan gods and heroes. And many of them (like Oedipus, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Jason, Dionysus, Apollo, Mithra, Horus and even Arthur) possessed a narrative of birth, death, and resurrection that was uncomfortably close to that of Jesus. And to make matters worse, many of them pre-dated the Christian Savior.
Ultimately, of course, the holiday is rooted deeply in the cycle of the year. It is the Winter Solstice that is being celebrated, seed-time of the year, the longest night and shortest day. It is the birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God -- by whatever name you choose to call him. On this darkest of nights, the Goddess becomes the Great Mother and once again gives birth. And it makes perfect poetic sense that on the longest night of the winter, 'the dark night of our souls', there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire, the Light of the World, the Coel Coeth.
That is why Pagans have as much right to claim this holiday as Christians. Perhaps even more so, as the Christians were rather late in laying claim to it, and tried more than once to reject it. There had been a tradition in the West that Mary bore the child Jesus on the twenty-fifth day, but no one could seem to decide on the month. Finally, in 320 C.E., the Catholic Fathers in Rome decided to make it December, in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons.
There was never much pretense that the date they finally chose was historically accurate. Shepherds just don't 'tend their flocks by night' in the high pastures in the dead of winter! But if one wishes to use the New Testament as historical evidence, this reference may point to sometime in the spring as the time of Jesus's birth. This is because the lambing season occurs in the spring and that is the only time when shepherds are likely to 'watch their flocks by night' -- to make sure the lambing goes well. Knowing this, the Eastern half of the Church continued to reject December 25, preferring a 'movable date' fixed by their astrologers according to the moon.
Thus, despite its shaky start (for over three centuries, no one knew when Jesus was supposed to have been born!), December 25 finally began to catch on. By 529, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In 563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four years later the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred, festive season. This last point is perhaps the hardest to impress upon the modern reader, who is lucky to get a single day off work. Christmas, in the Middle Ages, was not a single day, but rather a period of twelve days, from December 25 to January 6. The Twelve Days of Christmas, in fact. It is certainly lamentable that the modern world has abandoned this approach, along with the popular Twelfth Night celebrations.
Of course, the Christian version of the holiday spread to many countries no faster than Christianity itself, which means that 'Christmas' wasn't celebrated in Ireland until the late fifth century; in England, Switzerland, and Austria until the seventh; in Germany until the eighth; and in the Slavic lands until the ninth and tenth. Not that these countries lacked their own mid-winter celebrations of Yuletide. Long before the world had heard of Jesus, Pagans had been observing the season by bringing in the Yule log, wishing on it, and lighting it from the remains of last year's log. Riddles were posed and answered, magic and rituals were practiced, wild boars were sacrificed and consumed along with large quantities of liquor, corn dollies were carried from house to house while carolling, fertility rites were practiced (girls standing under a sprig of mistletoe were subject to a bit more than a kiss), and divinations were cast for the coming Spring. Many of these Pagan customs, in an appropriately watered-down form, have entered the mainstream of Christian celebration, though most celebrants do not realize (or do not mention it, if they do) their origins.
For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon 'Yula', meaning 'wheel' of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one. Pagan customs are still enthusiastically followed. Once, the Yule log had been the center of the celebration. It was lighted on the eve of the solstice (it should light on the first try) and must be kept burning for twelve hours, for good luck. It should be made of ash. Later, the Yule log was replaced by the Yule tree but, instead of burning it, burning candles were placed on it. In Christianity, Protestants might claim that Martin Luther invented the custom, and Catholics might grant St. Boniface the honor, but the custom can demonstrably be traced back through the Roman Saturnalia all the way to ancient Egypt. Needless to say, such a tree should be cut down rather than purchased, and should be disposed of by burning, the proper way to dispatch any sacred object.
Along with the evergreen, the holly and the ivy and the mistletoe were important plants of the season, all symbolizing fertility and everlasting life. Mistletoe was especially venerated by the Celtic Druids, who cut it with a golden sickle on the sixth night of the moon, and believed it to be an aphrodisiac. (Magically -- not medicinally! It's highly toxic!) But aphrodisiacs must have been the smallest part of the Yuletide menu in ancient times, as contemporary reports indicate that the tables fairly creaked under the strain of every type of good food. And drink! The most popular of which was the 'wassail cup' deriving its name from the Anglo-Saxon term 'waes hael' (be whole or hale).
Medieval Christmas folklore seems endless: that animals will all kneel down as the Holy Night arrives, that bees hum the '100th psalm' on Christmas Eve, that a windy Christmas will bring good luck, that a person born on Christmas Day can see the Little People, that a cricket on the hearth brings good luck, that if one opens all the doors of the house at midnight all the evil spirits will depart, that you will have one lucky month for each Christmas pudding you sample, that the tree must be taken down by Twelfth Night or bad luck is sure to follow, that 'if Christmas on a Sunday be, a windy winter we shall see', that 'hours of sun on Christmas Day, so many frosts in the month of May', that one can use the Twelve Days of Christmas to predict the weather for each of the twelve months of the coming year, and so on.
Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons, when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and sets the wheel in motion again. To conclude with a long-overdue paraphrase, 'Goddess bless us, every one!'

The point , just because there are traditions that we will not celebrate, it doesn't mean there are not others that we will share. The most important one, however, remains spending time with our loved ones.

Blessed Be!