The cover of a recent daily paper has the headline, “Bad Santa.” The accompanying picture shows a tall and skinny Santa doll holding the bloody severed head of a child. Apparently it was put up in protest of the crass materialism that now surrounds Christmas.
Interestingly, Christmas was a strongly contested holiday in US for most of this country’s history. The puritans and other religious purists viewed it as the remnants of a pagan tradition with no true basis in Christianity. (Try to find the date Dec. 25th in the Bible. I dare you). It was only with the birth of the corporation that Christmas took off, and for many, the biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday, is the day when Christmas shopping finally decides whether or not many of these corporations will post profits for that year.
Somehow my brother and I both ended up with a strong hatred of materialism. Maybe it was our father’s constant pressure to be successful that caused us to embrace the idea as an emotional safeguard in case we could never live up to his expectations. Maybe our embrace of the proletariat was our backup plan, our way of saying, “well, we never wanted to be successful anyway.”
Despite the puritan founder’s best attempts, Christmas has sunk its way deep into the Christianity of the US. So much so that there is now a backlash against all things Christmas in our country’s attempt to separate church and state. Places now sell holiday trees, not Christmas trees, and every public display of a Christmas tree is balanced out with symbols of other denominations and religions. Happy Chanukah and Kwanzaa to all. Chanukah isn’t even that important to most Jews. As my Shabbat loving friend put it, “it’s the celebration of a right-wing coup by a band of Jewish brothers, trying to overthrow their rulers.” In the Jewish world, it’s a relatively new holiday. New enough that the Ethiopian Jews don’t even celebrate it as they had long left Israel by that point, and it carries just a fraction of the importance of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, or Passover.
It was sort of a consolation prize for those kids that Santa didn’t bring any presents to. (Kwanzaa, a completely made up holiday compiling a number of traditional African ceremonies has an even more ridiculous history despite its good intentions.)
I remember back when I was around 6, there was some TV movie about the life of Jesus. I didn’t really know much about the guy and I had a little bit of trouble following the story. Being the budding artist I was, I attempted to draw the famous crucifixion and above my depiction of Our Lord’s death, I wrote the one single fact I was able to fully comprehend about the man.
“Jesus is a dead man.”
I didn’t mean it like the threat it sounds. It was just a statement of fact. Once this guy was alive, and now he’s died. Obviously he had historical importance, after all, they made a movie about him, but I really didn’t differentiate his role in the world from that of anyone else who lived and died and made a mark. Jesus, Napoleon, Bob Hope…same deal. All dead men.
Like any void, I wasn’t even aware of my own personal lack of religious knowledge. As hard as it is to imagine something happening at a public school now, I remember being quite young and a teacher asking us all what religion we were. The kids went down the line, some answering blandly, “Christian”, with others being more specific, stating, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Jewish, Hindi, Buddhist, and I even recall one Zoroastrian, only because it really impressed my teacher. At that point I didn’t know that Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, etc, were all “protestant” nor that they all fell under the even bigger umbrella of “Christian.” To my young ears it seemed like everyone had their own personal religion. When the teacher came to me, I didn’t have an answer for me, so she asked met he default question, “Do you celebrate Christmas?” and upon my answer, she told me I was a Christian.
Christmas, Christian, they sounded alike. It made sense to me. If you celebrate Christmas, you were a Christian. With all the glorious presents of Christmas, being a Christian seemed like the best one and I was pretty damn happy to be a Christian.
I ran home to tell my mom the good news. I was a Christian and therefore entitled to Christmas presents.
My mother frowned.
“The next time a teacher asks you that, tell them you’re a heaven.”
Later, when I turned 13. Certain friends of mine started getting big parties thrown in their honor. I seemed never to be invited. But one of my friend’s showed me a video tape of his “Bar Mitzvah” and there I saw something amazing. Boys dancing with girls, laughing and singing. I had never been to a party with girls like that so I was totally jealous. Sure, we had school dances, but at those the boys and girls just kinda stood at opposite sides of the room and kicked their feet, a brave few venturing off together to bear hug as they turned in circles together, but nothing like the carefree celebrations I saw on this tape.
My friend then went on to tell me about all the money he had gotten at his party, and all of a sudden I understood it all. You had to PAY to go to these parties, and since I really didn’t have any money at that point in my life, it made sense why I was never invited.
“No, no, no. They don’t pay to come, they give you money as a gift!” my friend explained. “just how much?” I asked.
The answer was a lot. A lot more money that I could even comprehend.
“So can I have one of these parties too?”
“No. Only Jews can have a Bar Mitzvah,” my friend informed me.
All of a sudden I was feeling the downsides to being a Christian.
But then a funny thing started to happen. All of my other “Christian” friends started all getting worried about some ceremony where they had to go to church and recite a bunch of religious lines.
“What? You don’t know what Confirmation is?” my friend asked.
I responded that I did not, and he told me the deal. Basically, when you are a baby, you are too young to accept God, so your God parents do it for you, then, when you are old enough, you go back to the church, and accept him your self.
Without doing this, I was told, you were condemned to hell.
I got scared. I didn’t have any God parents, so who was there for me when I was baptized?
Once again, I asked my mom.
“You weren’t baptized,” she said.
“What? So I’m condemned to hell?”
“How can you believe in a religion that thinks the difference between going to heaven and hell can come down to something so insignificant as dunking you in some water when you’re a baby?”
I didn’t have an answer. And it was then that realized just exactly what my mom meant when she said I was a heathen and what having two scientists as parents really meant.
We didn’t believe in God.
No wonder I didn’t have God parents. No wonder we never prayed. No wonder we never said grace or went to church, or did any of those things other families did.
But sometimes my mother would surprise me. Especially when she was tipsy and these questions would come out showing that her mind wasn’t exactly as made up as I thought.
“Will my mom see me as how I looked when she died? Or how I looked when I died?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in Heaven,” I replied.
“Maybe. I don’t know. It just doesn’t really make sense to me. And I don’t think I’d want to live for eternity anyway. It sounds pretty boring,”
My dad was a bit different. When Christmas or Easter rolled around, the music would start. Some days it was Handel’s Messiah and other classical pieces. Other days it was the classics…”Silent Night,” “Oh, Christmas Tree,” etc. etc.
Only they were in German.
My dad has a lot of German in him, and a lot of music in him as well. His whole side of the family is blessed with musical talent. Everyone plays an instrument and can sing with ease. Many of the women in my family history gave piano lessons or played at churches. I heard stories about my grandfather and his siblings sitting around a piano singing and playing music together, and other stories about my dad’s days in his college glee club.
I remember when he made me take piano lessons and how we’d play a game where I would press a key on the piano when he was in the other room and he would come back and be able to press the same exact key just from the sound of it.
That amazed me. I couldn’t do that. Sure, I could tell that the sounds each key made was different, but I could never wrap my mind around what exactly the difference was.
You see. I am tone deaf.
I got this from my mom. The lady doesn’t have a musical bone in her body. In fact, she has never even purchased a piece of music in her life. I’ve never even heard her listen to music on the radio. Our car rides were always the news or books on tape. Never music, except when my dad put it on.
This makes a birthday in our house an incredibly awkward thing. A father with perfect pitch growing increasingly frustrated as his tone deaf wife and kids murder the simplest of melodies. Usually someone was crying before the candles were even blown out.
And I think it was Christmas that our lack of musical ability hit him the hardest. It was the day he fondly remembered the holidays of his youth, spent with his musical family, singing classic carols in classic German, the family together as a whole and loving unit making beautiful harmonies together.
But not in our house. We hated singing and feared our father’s wrath over our lack of talent.
But the songs played anyway, and we inched further away from the living room away from his attempts to force musical talent into our talentless bodies, and the more we tried to escape, the louder the music became, until Christmas became nothing but music. Music screaming out about the talent we all lacked.
But it never once was about God, the Virgin Mary, or the Baby Jesus in our house. Just about the death of our German family traditions.
The puritans would have been so proud.
