So, Christmas is not a huge thing in my family. For religious reasons, my family has never celebrated Christmas. I've kind of done it a few times because I've been in relationships with people who do, but for the most part I find the whole affair confusing and unnecessary and the only Christmas stories I could actually get into were Die Hard and The Hebrew Hammer. As a result, I really have no idea what the deal is and all my research on it has only exacerbated my confusion. I've got a pretty solid bead on the history and the folklore, but the actual experience of celebrating Christmas doesn't seem to be well represented in media and has this sort of sheen of Norman Rockwell-esqe propaganda to it that makes it hard to take it seriously and I really doubt I could write an even remotely realistic Christmas scene based solely on it. So, for those willing to share, what is Christmas to you? What kind of traditions do you have? What were you taught about it as a kid? How did you feel about it and how has that changed much as you've grown older? Do you celebrate for religious reasons, social reasons, or some other reason? What are the expectations going into the holiday and how does that affect you emotionally, physically, and financially? Any help, explanations and anecdotes would all be greatly appreciated.
Beautifully stated. There are lots of things in the American cultural bag that have this Rockwell-esque gloss and for the most part it's easy to see for anyone willing to look how this gloss is applied much after the fact, part of the whole myth-making machine that gives us the incomparable Ellen Greene singing - heartbreakingly - about "Somewhere That's Green", a somewhere, a somewhen, that only lives within the pages of magazines and on dopey TV shows from an era that never really existed, not the way it's sold to us now. But enough of my Grinchiness: Where I live there are two separate holidays. Christmas itself - December 25th - is a religious holiday. If you go to church, you go to church that day. The prezzies are exchanged on Three Kings Day, a.k.a. Epiphany, on January 6th. Coca Cola Santa Clause ain't got shit to do with anything 'round here. Kids decorate a box, put grass in it, leave it under their bed (or more and more, under the tree) and the three mages who visited Jesus hook them up with cool stuff in trade for the grass left for their camels.
Do you celebrate Thanksgiving? Because I feel that I could start with Thanksgiving and add and remove things and end with a picture of secular Christmas. Religious Christmas is a different matter--my family was never very religious.
It's funny. I lived the first half of my life (till I was 37) in snowy northern Michigan, and I bought into the Rockwell sort of Christmas. I was never religious, but I did love Christmas carols. And my Christmas tree, wreaths on the door, lots of crunchy snow, sparkly crisp days, nights that were clear and full of stars, presents, etc. All of that good stuff. Winter was fun. I looked forward to it. And Christmas was in the middle of winter. Santa. Reindeer. Stockings hung by the chimney with care, etc. Then I moved to Scotland, where I've lived for the past 32 years. The winters here are VERY different from Michigan. We get very little snow. It's cold but very damp with constant cloud. And it's DARK. I mean it gets dark at around 3.30pm this time of year, and doesn't get light till around 9am. And even when it's broad daylight, there is a twilightish kind of feel to it, because the sun doesn't rise all that far above the horizon. It gets to around ten oclock rather than the summertime noon, if that makes sense. Winter is not fun in Scotland. So the midwinter celebrations have an entirely different feel to them. They feel more necessary, if that makes sense. It's not a celebration of the season. It's a celebration to try to forget the season. You really do need to believe that the sun will return, that spring will happen. And you need to be able to snuggle up indoors, out of the wind and rain and dark, and stay warm and cheery. Firelight helps. As do gatherings of friends. You bring greenery into the house as promise of constant life. You burn candles at night to keep the dark at bay. You eat the fruits of your summer and autumn labour. You worry about people who may be cold and miserable because they are poor, and you try to help in some way. I decorate a tree every year, but my taste in ornaments has changed. It's not so much Santas and snowmen ...in fact the only Santas I've got are ones friends from the States have given me. Instead, my ornaments, while new, revert back to a much older time, and reflect the wish to acknowledge and thwart the denizens of the dark. I have a Krampus. And a wild boar. A swan. A goose. And many strange little people. A grim Belsnickle santa. My tree is very pagan. And the top of it doesn't sport an angel or a star ...instead it is a large Dresden paper sun. I sit in front of my tree with all the other lights turned off, night after night during the Christmas period, staring into its depths and dreaming folktale dreams, while drinking some concoction that seems appropriate to the season. Kir Royale is a favourite. Bubbly, yet dark and fruity. Christmas in the old world has an entirely different feel to it. It's darker, and WAY older than the Christianity that assimilated it. And that's how I meld with it now.
IDK. To me it is a day that gives you an excuse to give other people stuff, and not in a random fashion, while giving them random items that they may or may not need. That being said, I will dust off my 2ft Fiberoptic tree, and may or may not decorate it further. Though I will not be using traditional ornamentation to adorn it since that takes far too long to set up and strip off it later on. Honestly I see it as the singular month in a year where the majority try and act like caring and sincere people, with lots of festive shit covering their living spaces. Almost how it should be year round minus the lights and music and stuff. Ultimately IDK what to think of it anymore.
I come from an nonreligious family - so no religious celebrating here. Then again I think that goes for most Swedes now a days. Some still go to church early on the 24:th, but we're not a very religious people these days. We have the "Staying Up Night" at the 23:rd playing Bingo, trying to get money. Julafton - the day we celebrate - is on the 24:th. We (this is mainly from my own family, but rather common) have stockings, julbord (smorgasbord with things Swedes tie to yule), julmust, table full of candy, presents and of course we watch Donald Duck and Christoper's Christmas Mission (Karl Bertil Jonsons Julafton in Swedish). What my family doesn't have - that most families seem to - is alcohol. There might be a tad alcohol in the glögg, but usually not even that. We've always been a family who likes to give and get presents and on top of that we only meet up the entire family like 2-3 times a year, so it's still special to us.
I don't go with that 'older than the saints' business. This time of year I join the fundamentalists, beating people who say 'happy holidays' or 'winterzones.' I like a real tree, and Jesus, carols on the radio and a great sadness and holiness. Previous sentimental account was deleted.
I'm curious about the last part (of the old post). Don't other countries do the thing with "buying news paper" on Christmas? Is that actually just a Swedish thing?
SALVAGE FRAG: I like the Swedish tradition on the 24th. Father stretches in his armchair. ‘Well well children I am going to buy a newspaper.’ Twenty minutes later St Nicholas arrives at the door… ... I learned it off Swedish students when I was the teach. Some 'freakish' English people do do a 24th. It's very European. Also we don't have Black Peter/St Nicholas quite the same. The English 'thing' is 'Father Christmas.' If an English man said 'Santa Claus,' for example, you wouldn't want to talk to him again. You'd wonder about his deviancy. English have pillowcases/stockings - with variation. I believe pillow-cases is regarded as 'a bit grubby.' Perfect pappas like a 'Gibbons, look what Father Xmas brought me in my stocking!' [over the fireplace] Contrasted with ...[F Xmas normally around 2am in kids' bedrooms, pillowcase @ bottom of bed] carrot & mince pie, milk or whisky.] satsuma & brazil nut at bottom of pillowcase. Wife's family never even wrapped presents before handing them to F Xmas, bizarre to me..
Alright, time to put on my professor glasses, I see. Not that I wear glasses, and I'm certainly no professor. But humor me here, please. Back in the old days, long before Christianity came to Europe, people used to celebrate Winter Solstice and Odin on December 21st. This is the longest night of the year, and the people here celebrated with plenty of the things we know today, such as singing Christmas songs and eating great food to prepare for the winter. This was called Yule, or Yule tide. Even to this day, it's common to use the word Yule when talking about Christmas some places. I'm from Norway, and Christmas is translated to Jul in Norwegian - a rewrite of Yule. When Christianity came to Europe, the church wasn't very happy that the pagans celebrated their own holidays and had their own traditions, and they did pretty much everything they could to make people stop. However, nothing worked. People don't give up their holidays that easily. So intead, the church tried a new tactic. If they couldn't stop the pagans from celebrating their holiday, they could rather change the holiday into a Christian holiday. And thus, "Christmas" was born. Another fun fact is that back in the 300s or so, there was a Christian bishop in what is now Demre in Turkey called Saint Nicholas of Myra (or of Bari, in some cases.) I don't know a whole lot about him, but what I do know is he was a very nice and kind man, and he often left presents for the poor and needy in secret. One of the better known stories is about a man who had three daughters, but with no way to support them, he couldn't afford to have them married off (as marriage came with a price back then.) All three of them risked being forced into prostitution to survive. Nicholas heard about this, but knew they were too proud to accept charity, even under these circumstances. So instead of giving them money directly, he delivered it in secret in the middle of the night. Does that sound familiar? Yep, that's right. Saint Nicholas of Myra was a real person - and the real Santa Claus. Santa Claus as we know him might not be real, but he is based on a real person. As for celebrating Christmas, that's very different depending on who you ask. I know you guys in the US celebrate it on the 25th, and we do too, to some degree. But over here, we celebrate it on the 24th. It officially starts at 5pm, and we have the Christmas dinner now. It varies a lot what people here eat, though my family use to eat pork ribs. Then we open the presents at an hour later, at 6pm. December 25th is also an important day, as everyone who can have a day off then, and we celebrate it with our families. We in my family always gather everyone and their families for turkey dinner. But I do know a lot of people who frown upon having turkey for Christmas, so if you ask ten people what they usually eat, you might get ten different answers. Just don't ask my mom. She actually served sushi one year. Not as the main course, but still... Sushi? In Norway? For Christmas? And that's pretty much Christmas for us. Dinner, presents, dinner next day.
[SHUDDER] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades ... Wikitpedia St Brendan came from Jesus and arrived via Ireland with the 'Good News.' He saw, disembarking at Dover, how the English people were blonde and blue-eyed creatures, or 'Angels' in Latin. Hence Angel-land. Previous pagan or Pict ritual is entirely heretical, and bears no comparison with the majesty of our Nativity scene on the 25th December.
I'm reminded of the book Unplug the Christmas Machine, which is intended to help people find what part of Christmas (mostly a US Christmas) gives them joy and what doesn't, and how to do other things. As a result, it describes a lot of those parts.
When I was a kid it was all about the presents. My family insists on opening gifts one at a time, with lots of breaks to try on new clothes, set up new toys, etc. It took most of the day just to get everything opened (always in front of a roaring fire to burn the wrapping paper, and some clown would always put in too much paper (different clown each year) and we'd have a near-house-fire, etc.). Then a brief break for the kids to play with their new stuff while my mom put the finishing touches on dinner, then eat ourselves silly, then crawl off to bed. As an adult? If there are kids around, it's still pretty gift-oriented, but we have a different kid-to-adult ratio, now, so gifts don't take nearly as long. So we're usually done by lunch, after which we usually go for a long walk, weather permitting, then come home and work together on the dinner. Less intense. My favourite part is probably Boxing Day, though. Boiling down the turkey carcass for stock, eating leftovers, another long walk, and just generally a much more relaxed time. We're not religious at all, so there's none of that to worry about.
I can tell you what I do on Christmas, and that even though I no longer believe in the religion I was raised with, I still do most of the rituals because I get a good feeling from going through them with my family. Starting in December, I make a list of relatives I need to buy gifts for: parents, grandparents, wife, kid, nieces and nephews, and I go shopping. We put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving. This is the first year (on account of having a kid) that me and my wife didn't go Black Friday shopping (which we found fun). We had bought 2-3 ordainments a year for our tree since we have been together, but this year my mom gave us a giant cardboard box of thrift store ordainments she didn't want anymore, so we took the ones we liked and filled out the tree, so everything on it is different, minus a couple weird sets we found. Christmas eve, the Christians in my family go to church or play music for their churches. After, everyone meets at my grandmother's house and brings a snacky dish, and we exchange gifts with some of the family (minus wife and parents). Me and my wife exchange gifts at home after midnight. Christmas morning, we go to my parents to exchange gifts and eat some kind of good breakfast, like bacon and waffles. After, we go to my grandmother's for lunch (which is like a smaller Thanksgiving with ham instead of turkey), and then see a movie--though this year I imagine that we will watch a movie at home instead of at the theater. Christmas things: Making Christmas cookies a few days before Football and Christmas Movies on TV Watching a special showing of Die Hard at a cinema or on TV Christmas services which include Christmas carols, a candlelight song, communion (the one time a year Protestants take communion) Door to door singing with church people Buying a toy or book and leaving it with the Marines for Toys for Tots Dropping a few bucks in the Salvation Army guy's bucket Putting Christmas lights up outside your house during the first week of December People asking adults what they want for Christmas, and adults thinking how to answer Edit: Interestingly, we have happily replaced all our Christmas ornaments of the religious variety (angels, stars, manger, baby Jesuses) and replaced them with commercial ornaments (Coke, ninja turtle, Piglet, Micky Mouse, Batman). I still like Santa, because I think he's suppose to look like some kind of druid / Oldman of the forest, and would like to start getting those lights for the tree that look like real candles to start giving it that old time pagan look.
Last year's trees. Why is it SO hard to get a decent picture of a lit-up Christmas tree? This is my main tree in the sitting room. We've since had the house rewired so this year there won't be all those trailing wires. We've got more outlets now and so we don't need the extension cords any more. This is my dining room tree ...you can't see it in the photo, but the ornaments are all old Russian ones from the Soviet era ...mostly made of paper and cardboard. I love them. They are cheerful and not the least bit religious. The greenery in the front of the photo is from my garden. I have lots of holly (and ivy and rosemary) growing there, and it all comes into decorative use this time of year! For some reason the third photo I posted doesn't seem to want to unload onto my message, but it's a photo of my Russian christmas tree (in the dining room) made a few years ago, back when I was still using real trees. (They are too much of a hassle to get, where I live. They are never fresh, and I get fed up with them dying on me after being up for only a few days. I finally made the jump to an artificial tree for both rooms. I prefer real trees (where I come from we used to cut them ourselves so they were VERY fresh) but there isn't any point in paying out a lot of money for a tree that was cut back in October. But this photo shows the ornaments.
I just had a look and am tempted to buy this book. (However, I just got RID of 22 kilos of books earlier this autumn. Damn, I wish it was available on Kindle...) I like what it says in the introduction (on the Look Inside feature on Amazon) about how so much time is spent in preparation for the big day ...and then the 25th is the end of it. Whereas in older times, that (or Christmas Eve or the solstice) was the begining of the midwinter holiday period that lasted for weeks. I get irritated when people want to celebrate Christmas weeks ahead of time. I cherish what I call Christmas Week—the week between Christmas and New Year—for visiting and parties and celebration, but I find that so many people I know are sick of Christmas by then. Some even take their trees down on Boxing Day. Certainly as soon as New Year has come and gone, that's it. You're considered a sluggard if you don't remove your stuff by then. I always leave mine up till Twelfth Night, but I often think about leaving it up a bit longer. However, since nobody else is doing it, it does feel as if I'm in denial, rather than celebrating for an extended period. That sort of celebration requires more or less universal participation. Visiting, still eating good Christmas food, enjoying the tree, the lights, etc. And it just starts to feel old when I'm the only one doing it and everybody else is saying 'oh, you've still got your tree up?' Scotland lost its ability to really enjoy the old-style Christmas during the Reformation, and never really picked it up again. And when it did pick it back up, in the 1950s or so, it picked up a lot of the tat and not much of the original feeling of midwinter celebration. Everybody seems to like a 'designer tree,' with coordinated colour ornaments that get changed every couple of years or so. Orgies of presents. And the English-style so-called feast, complete with crackers and paper hats, followed by either a nap or the Queen's Speech on TV. And that's it. Over and done. They direct all their pagan midwinter energy towards New Year (Hogmanay) instead. A mother of a friend of mine who lived to be 93 and died a few years ago told me that when she was a young woman, Christmas day wasn't a public holiday in Scotland at all, and nobody got the day off work. So I'm kind of bucking local tradition here, in a way. I think I feel more akin to full-on European celebrations, as held in Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Scandinavia, etc.
You can't leave your tree beyond 12th Night @J... Footfall past your door, through January, through February, March sees the tree in its corner, the cards scribbled by children, the tinsel. 'What happened to these people?' 'Something terrible and beyond horrible on Christmas morning?' We slip back through time. Derek tears the wrapping, his eyes evangelical. He drops the box. 'Babe, babe, I said Black n Decker chainsaw.' 'Honey, that's their own brand, assembly time is halved according to the assistant...' [MUSIC] Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I don’t know, but it drives me crazy! Just once I’d like to get a picture that does my parents’ tree justice. I’m not religious, so for me Christmas is about the Holiday Season rather than Christmas Day. Honestly, Christmas Eve is the main event in my opinion, because after that everything’s over. I like the atmosphere of December leading up to the holiday—the music, the decorations, and especially the lights. Christmas lights are my favorite part. I don’t decorate my apartment, since I live alone and there’s not really enough room. I tend to spend a lot of time at my parents’ house around the holidays (I’m only about 20 minutes away), so I try to help them out with getting ready. My mom bakes cookies close to Christmas Eve, so she likes to get the tree up early and get it out of the way. It’s the same artificial tree we’ve had since I was born (I think, anyway), and it’s the best tree I’ve ever seen. About seven feet high, and we string it with 1200 of the non-LED multicolored lights. When it gets dark in the living room the tree glows red and pink. Christmas Eve is always the same—going to my paternal aunt and uncle’s house for dinner, gifts, drinks, etc with my dad’s side. Usually the whole family comes and we have a traditional-adjacent Italian Christmas dinner. Not quite the seven fishes, but close enough. Christmas Day is at my parents’ house, just us, exchanging gifts. Then there’s the “Christmas Day” get-together with my mom’s side, again for dinner and presents, which could be any time between Christmas and New Year’s. That one rotates to a different host year after year. After that it’s done, and once it’s done I lose all enthusiasm for the holidays. It’s like a light switch. Because then it’s just two and a half more months of winter with nothing to look forward to until the warm weather comes back. Yuck.
This idea has stuck with me. Where I am in Canada, December 25 is really not a bleak time of year. November and early December tend to be grey where I am, nestled amongst all the moisture-producing Great Lakes. While they're still warm, they produce a LOT of cloud cover and snow. but by late December, the lakes are cold, or even frozen, so the skies tend to be clearer. The snow's on the ground to reflect light, and it's all really quite nice. And the snow is still a novelty. So, yes, I guess the days are shorter, but I really don't have that sense of oppressiveness that I'm feeling from your description of Scotland. For us, that probably comes in mid-February, when we're so tired of snow and cold and the end really isn't in sight! if we had a big celebration then, I can see it being a lot more desperate and intense and pagan-y, for sure. (As it is, we all just bitch at each other and drink too much... so, not that different from Christmas, really!)
It is not entirely accurate. You can wear either hat. We spent Xmas by Eilean Donan castle in the far NW Highlands. Sunshine, no snow, 0 degrees. I walked with the children through forests that were like fairy glades, the path lush with green grass, no footsteps, no sign of people. Pine trees on either side, ferns, streams, brooks, dragonflies. Climbing up through the forest for a mile we came to the bleak, desolate moor 'zone', and then trekked another half mile to the mountain section toward summit [& snow]. One of my most striking memories. I yearn for a return - with a dog this time :/ My son slid home on his belly all the way back down through the trees like a slalom. Down in the valleys the old clan graveyards, very spooky as the fog descends. Gather round the fire in your cabin to warm up.
