I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT CHRISTMAS for over two months.
And almost none of it involved what presents I wanted.
Researching and writing some three dozen Xmas-themed freelance tidbits for Everything Holidays has taught me a thing or twelve about how I view the season. Some of these new-found notions:
- Jesus probably wasn’t born in December. It probably doesn’t matter. Historical accuracy is fine for research papers, but the realm of legend and faith is a whole different world which operates on whole different laws.
- The early Christians didn’t celebrate the baby Jesus. In the decades after Constantine made Catholicism the official church of Rome, the once-heretical sect planted roots throughout Europe by taking local winter-solstice rites and icons (trees, wreaths, Yule logs, etc.) and rewriting them. Instead of celebrating the return of longer days to a darkened world, post-Constantine Christians used the same time of year to celebrate the return of God’s hope to a world in spiritual darkness.
Certain “one-true-church” outfits, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, think this represents the dilution of Christian purity with pagan influences. As someone who believes purity is something for show dogs, I happen to like this mix-‘n’-match iconography. Indeed, if Christians hadn’t learned early on to borrow from assorted cultural traditions, we’d have no Christian punk bands today. (You can choose for yourself what you think about that.)
- Christmas brings out the weirdness in people. That one I’d known for some time; but this research has proven it.
The weirdness is to be found in the goofball presents and decorations; the truly odd spectacle that is the Christmas episode of a TV series (even Pokemon and He-Man have ’em!); the curiously unsexy spectacle of “erotic” holiday cards (Hint: If you’re nude, you really shouldn’t stand that close to Christmas-tree needles); and in the basic all-American contradictions surrounding the modern holiday season.
- Christmas is a time of mixed messages. And that’s OK. It’s a time associated with somber reflection and with photocopying your butt at office parties. A season of simple pleasures and of incessant exhortations to keep priming the pump of consumer spending. A period of quiet joy and the forced comisseration of at-odds relatives, ex-spouses, and other people one tries to avoid the rest of the year. A holiday many Jewish kids feel left out of, that’s about the world’s most famous Jewish kid.
But the human race is an oddball, mongrel species.
And any holiday promising hope and renewal to humans had better offer these things to humans as they, as we, are–nerds and geeks and dorks and hotheads and eggheads and dopes and neer-do-wells and fussbudgets and all the rest of us.
In the immortal words of Rudolph’s pal Yukon Cornelius, even among misfits you’re misfits.
MONDAY: Movie memories on the streets.
ELSEWHERE:
