The Real Meaning of Christmas

Sermon

The Real Meaning of Christmas

I've struggled for as long as I can remember to get the major holidays of the year "Right." I don't mean cook the turkey to golden perfection, or time the various courses so they come out of the oven simultaneously. I mean something bigger, something bigger about me, my family of origin and later my family by partnership. Something about what I believe, who I want to be -- as our song of exultation says

Since what we choose is what we are
And what we love we yet shall be
The goal may ever shine afar
The will to win it makes us free

My parents divorced when I was 7. I'm an only child, so even when my mother was around, we had a small family. My mother wasn't good at establishing traditions around holidays -- well, around anything. I guess she didn't know I'd become a vegetarian when she served Cornish game hens for Thanksgiving one year -- and let me tell you in my mind's eye I could see those little birds running around a barnyard, and before you knew it I was in tears. After my mother left, my father raised me. He did a great job day to day, but fell far short in the holiday department. Our first Thanksgiving together without my mother he brought my grandmother into town and the 3 of us ate out at the only restaurant we could find open on Thanksgiving. It was the old Yen Cheng Palace. I cried again because we weren't "really doing" Thanksgiving, and my grandmother who hadn’t experienced Chinese mustard before was crying for another reason. My dad was just about crying with exasperation over the two of us.

The key term for me about Thanksgiving was Big, and how do you do "BIG" and "Traditional" when you have a 2 person family (3 when my grandmother was present).

Christmas was little better. My dad was an "agnostic in case" and raised me without religion but with lots of Christmas gifts, which suited me fine. My mother was passionately Christian, I decided early on that I was uncomfortable with Christ in the role of savior, and my connection with religious Christmas wasn't a comfortable fit but I sure liked the present part.

None of this improved when I got older and tried to shoe horn myself into my first husband's family's traditions. That was when I progressed into the classic "his family and its traditions? or mine?" When we celebrated with my family I was the one who did most of the cooking, most of the cleanup and all the planning. I'd sort of won the battle and lost the war of discovering what the holidays meant to me, what I wanted them to be, and what that said about me.

After my first marriage ended I decided to create my own traditions, but I had little to go on. And frankly it has been a work in progress ever since. My personal lesson number one for the holidays: holidays are a work in progress.

For me lesson number two was to get help in figuring out the intensity of my reaction to Christmas as my partner Ken, our son Nathan and his big kids celebrate it. I love all these people enormously, I enjoy them individually and in every combination I can name. And Christmas is in many ways one of my favorite days. But a few years ago, I was ready to declare us a Christmas-free family, and start to work out a totally new and different way to celebrate the middle of the winter. But no one in my family wanted to do this -- probably not even me! I needed some big help to work out a Christmas that worked. I called in Reverend Liz.

My conversations with Liz on the subject lead me to my lesson number three -- She suggested I claim parts of Christmas I can accept and move away from the parts I can’t. She suggested not throwing out the whole holiday, since I love parts of it. Instead, she suggested that even naming the parts of the "Christmas Package" that I accept and reject would be powerful for me.

She was right.

Being a good academic, I started reading everything that I could find on family traditions. I've got a small reading list in the order of service for those who are interested in the subject.

The one that proved to be most helpful was "the Intentional Family." I love the title because it works 3 ways. One is about the intentional way the author recommends you analyze the holidays you celebrate to figure out what aspects of the holiday and its beliefs and celebration and ritual work for you and your family and what doesn't. Another is about intentionally choosing who to include in your life as family. Who says that family, for purposes of holidays, needs to include the most difficult members of your family of origin? Maybe you can exclude some people. Or maybe dear friends can now be acknowledged as family by including them in your holiday traditions? The last is about making the family you have more intentional in the ways that it celebrates and creates traditions. Working out ahead who will cook, clean, how to help the person who often has a bad time (or causes others to have a bad time) because of a drinking problem, etc.

Just to repeat, those 3 types of intentionality are:

• Intentionally analyzing the holidays you celebrate to figure out what aspects of the holiday and celebration work for you and your family and what doesn't;
• Intentionally choosing who to include in your celebrations; and
• Being intentional in the ways that you and your family celebrate and creates traditions. Work out, and talk through strategies for doing the work like cooking and cleanup, and making sure everyone gets a chance to participate in the fun parts.

And of course this is all very UU because my assumption is that the parts of the holiday and tradition that work for me, and for my family, may not work for yours.

And now we’ve come full circle. I’d like to show you the book I read at the beginning of the service. What you can now see, is that there is a yellow mark on each and every page. A highlight placed on the parts of each of these historic, or commercial, or traditionally religious, or moralistic tales, that I can keep holding onto. Words like "A big tree was decorated, and lights were lit and people gave each other presents. Families and friends came together to eat good food and to enjoy each other’s company around the tree." And "star" and "light" and "gifts" are all in yellow. There is at least one highlight per little chapter. And together they come together to tell a story that my family and I can agree on - at least for today:

Our Christmas takes something from all these other stories, but is our own.

We believe Christmas is a time to enjoy good food and a big decorated tree, together with our families and the people we love. We enjoy lights on the tree and around the house. We have a special star at the top of the tree, to symbolize the star the shepherds and wise men. We give each other presents to show our love for one another. We enjoy seeing pictures of Saint Nick, or Santa Claus and hearing about his elves and flying reindeer and we even put up stockings by the fire place so we can remember to be generous to poor people. We give strangers who need help presents. We sing carols and songs since this is a fun way to be together and to remember all the other Christmases we have enjoyed as a family and community. This, for us, is the real spirit of Christmas, the spirit of spirit of "love and generosity."