My brother called and asked if I was “ready for Christmas”. Then he checked himself and asked if I was “doing anything” for Christmas. He knew I would not be. As always, I fell into my default setting of protecting the people asking that question. I try to protect them from the embarrassment they feel when I say “Oh, you know…home alone.”
If I am brutally honest, I resent that. Not being home alone, that bit’s fine, more than fine. I resent feeling that I have to protect other people from how they feel about my situation – especially when how they feel is not remotely connected to how I feel about it.
I have a Christmas wish, which I’m not probably allowed to make because I don’t believe in Christmas.
On the other hand, I do believe in faeries and angels and the thinness of the worlds at Mid-Winter, so maybe some other spirit may grant it for me.
I wish people would stop asking me "what I’m doing for Christmas”, so that I can stop having to say, “I’m not.”
And then they can stop dealing with their uncertain responses to that.
I wish people would, instead, ask if I celebrate Christmas. That would be a much easier opening into the conversation that includes that, no, I don’t, I’m not a Christian and so there are things I don’t do…but then, there are the things I do, that tie in with that festival from its more ancient roots.
For the record, these are the things I don’t do…
…anything to do with the Christian religion, except maybe sing a few carols, just for the music
…I don’t go to midnight mass, or its equivalent
…I don’t sit down to a turkey dinner on the 25th of December with a bunch of friends and family
…I don’t watch our current monarch telling us his view of the world
…I don’t watch schmaltzy movies
…I don’t play party games, pull crackers, wear silly hats, give lots of unwanted gifts, wear a “Xmas Jumper”, eat more food than usual, watch miserable soap operas etc on the 25th just because it is the day we are supposed to do such things…though to be fair, I may do some of those things on other days around that time, especially the cracker-pulling-hat-wearing bit
I’m not agin any of these things, and please do take deep joy in them, if they are part of your festival.
My wish is that you do not feel sorry for me just because they are not part of mine. My wish is that when you ask me about my festival, you hold in your heart an assumption of joy, not one of sadness.
As a sensitive, I feel your assumptions deeply and they are not helpful. In the midst of those conversations I do feel sad, because - and only because – you feel sad for me. That is every level of wrong.
So let me tell you what I do, instead. You don’t have to agree with it. You can think it’s all bunkum. But if you care about me – and/or others who maybe think the same way or are in the same situation and dealing with it in their own different ways – just be open to the idea that we do it different, and different works.
I gave up Christmas gradually. I gave up the religion a long time ago, but things like carol services and midnight mass still held a resonance for a good long while. Not because I believed any of the stories, but because I loved the ritual and the romance and the music – and maybe because I loved the stories as stories, as metaphors, as ideas – and also because they were links into my own familial past. Letting go of the faith was easy. Letting go of the family traditions came harder. Those echoes still linger.
Let’s face it, a candlelit Cathedral with simple stories and beautiful music, and other people’s actual faith surrounding you, it’s hard to resist. I still enjoy a carol service on the rare occasions I attend.
I moved on. I came into my own way of seeing life, the universe, and everything. I moved back to the older way of seeing things.
Now my mid-Winter festival spins around the Winter Solstice.
Because this is a forgotten festival, or at least a mainly neglected one, we are allowed to celebrate it more quietly, to do what we are called to do on an individual level, and to recognise that this may change year on year. For many years I wrote a formal Solstice Prayer, read it and then released it into the fire and the wind. I no longer feel the need to do this.
Now I feel a stronger need to write a blessing for others and to make a gift of my thoughts. Where others have stopped sending Christmas cards, I have started to give Mid-Winter Blessing cards. Home-made, heart-felt. I hope that some of these mean something to the people receiving them, but if not that doesn’t matter so much, because the making and giving of them means something to me.
Now when I put up my tree and festoon it with decorations, it is partly an honouring of the tree spirits, asking them to bless the inside of my house as well as the outside. It is also partly in rememberance of my ancestors. Among those decorations are things older than I am. Some that have come to me from my parents; some that have through Clive's family. Among them are things I remember buying as a child, and later. Some from the hawkers in the arcade in Darlington. Some from the Weihnactsmarkt in Karlsruhe. Some of them remind me of others long since broken or lost.
Now I feel an alignment with someone else’s tradition of last-light/first-light walks. I’ve adopted that and am weaving it into my own turning-of-the-year. For me that’s the real point of it all: the turning of the year, the pivot point where the planet starts to revolve back to longer, lighter days.
Now I make a choice to go somewhere specific, somewhere different to do that walking – and then to come home for the rest of the holiday, to just be home and take it all quietly. I love the notion that while everyone else is still stressing about how to make it a perfect 24 or 48 hours, or worse a whole holiday season of perfection and people-pleasing, I will be calming and coming to rest. Nothing to do, nothing to prove. Wintering.
Last year’s plans foundered on bereavement, on high tides, on disrupted railway journeys. And then they resurfaced on a beautiful sunrise over the sea. There’s a metaphor right there for the changing nature of the planet’s turning. Overnight, things change. Pain shifts into beauty. Anxiety calms into rest.
I have no idea how it will be this year. I do know there will be a lot of candle-light. There will be a lot of writing, a lot of quiet nothingness connecting time, a lot of juggling days that were meant to be one thing becoming another thing time, a lot of memory time, a lot of peace, hopefully some unexpected joy.
I have a plan. I have a lot of white space. I have no deadlines.
There will be dinners and gift-giving. There’s likely to be coffee and cake. There will be memories and, hopefully, memory-making. There will also be space for the people I know who are having a tough time right now, to use as they need, to call on me or ignore me, however it helps most. None of it is written in stone. None of it needs to be perfect.
There will be love and light and laughter…but if there wasn’t also darkness we wouldn’t need the candles and the fairy lights. And we do. We need the glitter and the tinsel. I think we need them to remind us to look up: to see the stars in the sky, the vastness of space, the brightness of distant fires. We also need them to remind us to look down: to see the frost forming on a leaf, a single raindrop on a blade of grass, the intense details of the planet we call home. You might think tinsel and glitter is wasteful tat…I choose to think of it as a reminder to connect. I believe that to know that there are sparkly things in the darkness is no bad thing.
Like I say, this is just my way of seeing things, at this point in my life. I may change again. But for now one of the things about doing all of this in my own way, is that when it all goes off at a tangent, it really doesn’t matter at all. I can follow my own star.
Following the star, means you don’t need a map, or a compass, or to explain to anyone else why you’re doing what you’re up to, or where you’re headed. And that’s actually a pretty brilliant way to spend the turning of the year. Or indeed any other day.
