A friend of mine tells the story of little boy who made a Christmas present for his parents at nursery school — a ceramic dish with his hand-print in the middle.
When he brought the dish home from school he was so excited that he came charging through the door, carrying his precious gift, knowing it would make his parents happy, and he tripped and fell, and he heard the breaking of his ceramic plate.
He began to cry inconsolably and his father, wanting to reassure the boy, said, “That’s okay, son, it really doesn’t matter, it was the thought that counts.”
He wouldn’t be consoled, so the boy’s mother sat on the floor with him and hugged him as he cried and the boy said, “It does matter, doesn’t it Mommy,” and she said, “Yes, it matters,” and they cried together.
It matters – it matters how we approach the holidays – and we need to be careful not to fall down and break whatever it is we’re carrying into this season – and we need to pay attention to what we’re carrying, and by this I mean all that we carry, all our accumulated baggage, our memories, so that we can safely negotiate our way into and through them again this year. And our hand print is ‘in the middle’ of every gift.
One of the important aspects of negotiating the holiday season has to do with being a good, grateful receiver in order to enhance the giver’s experience…because we know the truth in the old proverb, “It’s better to give than to receive.”
Giving is empowering. The little boy in the story is a reminder that ‘it matters’ – it matters how we give and how we receive.
The holiday season begins at Thanksgiving and pushes relentlessly and a bit clumsily through the eight days of Hannukah and then on to Christmas – the long holiday march doesn’t let up until New Year’s Day. Kwanza is a relatively newcomer to the mix and we don’t know what, if anything, to do with it..
It’s a demanding season, and sometimes it feels like it gets imposed on us, like it or not, and we have to learn how to respond – we have to learn again and again how to deal with the various demands of the holiday season, many of those demands are self-imposed, but just because they are self-imposed doesn’t make them any less demanding or obvious as to how to handle them.
Self-imposed demands are the most tyrannical…self-imposed demands are the cruelest of all!
A holiday, by definition “…is a day designated by a government or a religion as having special significance for which observance is warranted.”
The word ‘holiday’ comes down to us from the Old English word for holy day – originally it referred only to religious days specified in the church calendar. In modern use, it means any special day of rest or relaxation; when we take a vacation we say we’re ‘on holiday.’
In the year 350 A.D. Pope Julius I authorized December 25, the winter solstice, to be celebrated as the birthday of Jesus. The ancient pagan festival, Natalus Invictus, celebrated the return of the sun, the return of the Invincible Sun. After all, the sun is reborn at the time of the winter solstice—the days grow longer. In the Julian calendar the winter solstice was on December 25, thus the Christmas date.
In Puritan America Christmas was considered a Pagan holiday and for a time there were laws against recognizing it.
In 1832 Charles Follen, then a Professor at Harvard and soon to become a Unitarian minister, lit 100 candles on an evergreen tree in his house in Cambridge – a custom he carried from his native Germany – it was the first Christmas tree in America, or so we said when I was an associate minister at the church in Lexington named for Charles Follen where we sold Christmas trees every year.
Who would have ever thought that Christmas decorations would become so elaborate and so secular as they are today?
We acknowledge that Thanksgiving is a secular-but-sacred holiday, and we realize that Christmas has become more secular and less sacred every year, in spite of the Christian clergy’s plea to ‘put Christ back in Christmas,’ with bumper stickers that say ‘He is the reason for the season.’
There are several ‘reasons for the season,’ not the least of which is the economy, that mysterious presence that hovers over us…the Divine Hand that moves the Dow Jones average up and down and determines our earthly fate on a daily basis.
One of the important indicators of a strong economy has to do with Christmas shopping. Some folks even suggest that Christmas shopping is an act of patriotism!
The holiday season is a time when you are supposed to be happy…it demands that you be happy – jolly, even, “Smile for Santa!”
The demand to ‘be happy’ calls attention to any and all underlying and lingering feelings of sadness that are inevitably brought on by the sense of loss we feel because we’re reminded of the absence of people with whom we were happy – happy to share those holidays. It can be a difficult time of year.
Feelings of depression during the holiday season are natural – reactive depression is the sadness we feel in response to a loss. There’s a lingering sense of loss that easily gets triggered at holiday time, since it’s a time of looking back, a time of remembering.
We’re reminded, too, that the children have grown – the children for whom we happily tried to make the holidays a happy time for them; making the holidays happy for them was the way many of us made ourselves happy!
The point is that we have to negotiate the holidays in at least two senses: first, to succeed in getting through them – to survive the sudden twists and dangerous turns – to negotiate the holidays without damaging relationships because of differences in how we want to celebrate the holidays, or not celebrate them; and secondly, to negotiate by actually discussing the ways to ‘do them’ – discussing and making plans with family and friends.
To negotiate, in this sense, is to try to reach an agreement or compromise by talking about it with those with whom we hope to celebrate the holidays. It’s not all that complicated, but there seems to be something about the process of negotiating the holiday season that seems a bit risky if not treacherous!
In a recent negotiating conversation with my daughter she suggested that our annual family dinner near Sturbridge Village be without the usual exchange of gifts. It turned out to be an easy negotiation since I was in total agreement, so we took a poll and found that everyone agreed. We’ll test it out and see how it works. It feels a bit risky; change always feels risky.
We’ll do our gift giving, to be sure, but we’ll keep it separate from the Sturbridge holiday dinner gathering. We’ll work on it; we’ll work at it, and hopefully it won’t require too much struggle.
The well-regarded psychologist, William James, said it this way:
“What our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still — this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to suggest.”
The holiday season is stressful, but it’s the kind of stress we seem to need, otherwise why would we bring it on?
Stress has been defined as our response to all non-specific demands placed on it. We can readily, if not easily, respond to the specific, clearly-defined demands, but the non-specific demands eat away at us, and the holidays are filled with these non-specific demands, especially the demand to make those we love happy and to be happy ourselves.
It’s okay. We need some stress in our life. Hans Selye, one of the pioneers of stress research said, “The absence of stress is death.”
He said that stress was not something that necessarily had to be avoided at all costs; it is, to some extent at least, an everyday fact of life, so we might as well get used to it. He suggests that if we had no stress life would be very dull. Stress on the violin string allows the notes, but the violinist must adjust the strings to the right tension. We all need to learn how to adjust the strings on the instrument we’re playing. Life!
Stress comes from a variety of sources, including our physical bodies, our minds, changes in our lives and the pressure to make decisions.
Stress comes from our environment – from noise, from the weather, from reports of crime and the reading of the names of those who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Stress comes to us from threats to our self-esteem, and failing to do the holidays to meet the expectations of loved ones is a threat to our self-esteem, just ask old Ebenezer Scrooge!
Stress comes from aging, from illness, from accidents, from inadequate sleep, and over exhaustion.
Adjusting to change brings it on – we feel stress from positive change as well as the negative. Research into the effect on the lives of those who won huge lotteries is interesting. John Steinbeck wrote about it in his moving story, The Pearl.
A sense of time urgency is stressful – the stress of day-to-day pressures of work with its deadlines and the fear of failure; or from family commitments – we all have ‘promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep.’
We have to negotiate the holidays with caution because it matters how we deal with them – it matters to those we love, so it matters to us.
Most of the people who braved the crowds on black Friday, starting at 3 or 4 a.m., were on a serious, spiritual mission, hoping to find appropriate, special gifts to give to someone they love. Yes, they hoped for a bargain, but the point is that ‘it matters,’ how we negotiate the season, because love matters.
One of the important aspects of negotiating the holiday season has to do with being a good, grateful receiver in order to enhance the giver’s experience…because we know the truth in the old proverb, “It’s better to give than to receive.”
Giving is empowering. The little boy in the story reminds us that ‘it matters’ how we give and how we receive.
The most significant gift each of us has received is the gift of Life itself. It matters that we reflect on our appreciation for this gift.
On Friday morning as I walked along the sidewalk overlooking Compo beach there was a spectacular sunrise – the low hanging cloud formations turned a brilliant red and orange and allowed the eyes to stay focused on the display since the clouds blocked the sun from a direct hit. Ordinarily you can’t keep staring at the sun as it rises, but from time to time it moves through cloud formations that allow you to keep watching – and this was one of those mornings.
It felt good to be out in the crisp winter air, it felt good to be alive and to be taking it all in…the new day, the holiday season and all the memories carried in that basket.
At our staff meeting on Thursday Perry offered the following closing words:
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.
It turns denial into acceptance,
Chaos into order,
Confusion to clarity.
It can turn a meal into a feast,
A house into a home,
A stranger into a friend.
Gratitude makes sense of our past,
Brings peace for today,
And creates vision for tomorrow.
– Melody Beattie