Licia Biker Santa, by Terri 2009
I wrote this back in 2006, when I was fiercely examining how to reclaim the holidays as my own delightful invention, rather than something belonging to someone else that I was trying on.
Many of us seem to blindly follow the crowd, as if in some sort of trance, when it comes to holiday time. I certainly did this for many years! But the anxiety and disgust that I started to feel about the holidays clued me in that something wasn’t quite right in my relationship with what could be a truly joyous time of year.
You see, in order to see the culture, we must step outside of it. Whatever it is that we are enmeshed with, it is very difficult to get clarity about the relative health of the situation unless we remove ourselves from it. The extrication can be messy, especially when we are dealing with families and the high expectation of holiday time.
It’s not an easy road to walk to look with a critical eye at the unconsciousness that can abound this time of year. But I feel it’s better to deal with the discomfort that comes with the truth than to live with a lie.
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Here we are again! It’s the holiday time, and it never seems to fail to come back every year. In my healing work, I think of things coming back over and over to prompt me to look at something about myself that needs some love and perhaps a change for the better. I wonder if the holiday season might be a ripe opportunity for this kind of self reflection?
I think of the holidays as a time when we lose our center so easily! It’s when the family trance comes over us like a mist, and we move about like robots following our marching orders. Where are those orders coming from? We are indoctrinated early to associate the holidays with over-consumption of all kinds. We buy in to the idea that we must get together with families and that we must all have a wonderful time together. We keep expecting the magic and mystery of the holidays to fill our hearts, but more and more of us are barely surviving until after the New Year, when we thank our lucky stars that we made it through one more holiday season. ENOUGH!
I have come to see the madness that begins at Halloween and lasts through January 2nd (here in the U.S.) as an embarkation on a crazy, out-of-control bus. If you ever saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, you might remember the wild bus ride that Harry endures when he is whisked away from his ordinary muggle-life to another year at Hogwarts. As Harry alights on the bus, the driver steps on the gas and the bus careens at insane speeds through traffic, almost running pedestrians over. The ancient, decrepit bus driver is guided by a shrunken head who advises in a creepy, sarcastic tone when to brake, when to lift the skirts of the bus over other traffic, and when to make the bus pancake-thin in order to get through various obstacles. Harry seems to doubt whether he will survive this bus ride; it is so crazy, so out of control, so frightening. It is INSANE. Perhaps the holidays don’t always make us wonder if we are going to remain bodily intact, but I know that many wonder if they will survive the crazy ride emotionally intact!
It is interesting to me how I have moved through different cycles during my years of celebrating the holidays. Certainly, as a child, I was delighted and mystified and just loved the essence of the holiday time, but I picked up on the adults’ stress and discontent, too. They talked a good talk about the reason for the season being about giving and thankfulness and love, but that did not match with the alcohol, the family fights, the tears and stress around holiday time. I dove into my presents and played with my cousins and tried my best to ignore them. I hung on blindly to the idea of santa claus, a sweet, generous man who expected nothing in return. I was devastated when my mother broke it to me that he did not exist (at age eleven!) The mystery was gone.
Then it became about getting stuff….as an adolescent, I wanted but could not have the fancy things my fellow high schoolers had. As a young adult putting myself through college, I do not remember a single Christmas (was I in a fog or did I just not celebrate?) When I met my husband, I was adopted into his family and became part of the mega-family-holiday machine. They had traditions that had been in place for generations in their southern aristocratic lineage. I did not feel the permission to question or reject their traditions, so played along for awhile as a I thought a dutiful daughter-in-law should. It was overwhelming and exceedingly uncomfortable for me.
When my husband and I had our own children, at first we tried to continue to attend holiday gatherings with the extended (and I do mean extended….like 50-plus people) family, but then there was the hardship of trying to honor my own family of origin. Whose turn is it this year? Let’s see, Christmas with mine, Thanksgiving with his…no, that’s how we did it last year. I started to feel like the sausage two dogs were fighting over! Then I got bitten by the Martha Stewart bug and wanted to create the most magical holiday season possible for my family-the only problem was I did not have a staff of 300 to help me out! I got over that one pretty quick.
And then there was this little voice inside me that said it was time to create our own traditions, in our own nuclear family, on our own terms. I wanted to choose consciously where to put my energy for the holidays. It was a huge shock to Peter’s family (not so huge for mine as I had already set some firm boundaries with them) for us to elect not to participate in the machine. Peter’s parents expressed their unhappiness, and I am certain we were called some unattractive names by some in his family of origin, but we held our ground. Now, some years later, it is expected by all that we will be having our Christmas at home with our own little family of four (and our cat!) They are allowed to feel how they want to feel, and that is okay; I cannot control their choice to take it personally when we stay home. But I do not feel responsible for their happiness any more. They are free to choose what they want to do with their time just as we are. AH….freedom!
It has been quite an exploration over the years to look at where I am trying to make others happy, trying to meet some unspoken obligations, trying to exceed expectation. Identifying what resonates with my heart, instead of blindly clinging to traditions just because others do. And now, our own family is expanding our idea of what the holidays mean to us. We feel into our hearts as to what is best for us. Yes, we consciously choose to incorporate some “traditional” rites during the holidays, but because they resonate with us. And we incorporate some other things that are not traditional, again because that is what resonates with our family. For example, we choose to celebrate the Winter Solstice as the beginning of our Yule celebration; we have a giant party with bonfire and wonderful food, and several craft stations set up to make snow flakes, paper-bead jewelry, cinnamon ornaments, and other fun things. Then we have a ceremony to acknowledge the year that has passed, giving thanks for the bounty and the successes. We write on colorful pieces of paper those aspects of ourselves that we feel we can lovingly release and transform, and then we throw them into the fire, blessings them as they burn. We dance, we sing, and we celebrate being alive. It is a wonderful night of kinship and love.
I am realizing it is always up to us, that we can choose consciously to enjoy what we already do for the holidays by being fully present and with a loving heart, or we can choose consciously to re-form what we do to reflect what makes us happy. I don’t see much sense in a lot of running around and stressing out and settling for interactions that make me feel unhappy or even crazy! Life is too short!
Blessings to you and yours for this holiday season and always!
