Re-Inventing Christmas to save it

We adults are free to re-imagine Christmas in a way that pleases us. We are allowed to not buy anything. We may go to church or not, go to the in-laws or not, get a tree or not.

When you are a kid, you live amidst the rituals of your family and society, and there's little wiggle room. But as adults, it's completely pleasing to accept and reject the traditions that we love or hate.

I am agonized by the gluttonous consumption. Much of my distaste for Christmas comes from the TV ads, who snort all the beautiful holy and true and cough out tinsel to hang on their products. So I reject the consumerism and the buy-buy-buy. I saw a study that said people rarely had stuff they bought a year later, and Christmas gifts were even less likely to be retained. It's a small planet, people, we can't afford to be whole-hogging the resources that we don't need.

But as much as I hate the the corporate consumerist Christmas, and I groan at that season's arrival every year, so too, every year I am seduced by Christmas and it's ability to expose a deeper humanity.

Christmas is the one seasonal holiday in America that's really still observed society wide, everything closes, things slow down, people are nicer to each other because it would be dickish to be so douschy so near Christmas.

This year I've been going to Dorset's congregational church. It's a beautiful marble building, made in 1784, filled with tastefully psychedelic stain-glass windows. Further, the Holy Spirit is in the room there, one can feel it, a pulsing current, a deep hum. Last week they did a sweet Christmas pagent, with twenty kids playing the parts: sheep, wisemen, Mary, everybody. I like singing the hymns that somehow automatically catapult your consciousness into relationship with the Divine.

There are few young people in church these days. Perhaps if they felt more freedom to reinvent the traditions in a way that worked for them, they'd be more into it.