Christmas is upon us, and I glide through the capitalist frenzy and social anxiety with frictionless insouciance. I buy no Christmas presents; I have no Christmas tree; I don’t know what I’m doing Christmas day, and I don’t care. I won’t say it’s a day like any other. Obviously, it’s not. But I have sloughed off the rituals and cultural expectations implanted deep in my childhood.
Being Jewish, I could never confuse my sentimental connection to Christmas with the holiday’s presumably religious roots. The Babe in the Manger, the Three Wise Men, the Littlest Angel, or the Little Drummer Boy never moved me. Like all kids, Jewish or not, I got jacked up by Santa, the pile of presents, the trimmed Christmas fir, “Now, DASHER! now, DANCER! Now, PRANCER and VIXEN!/On, COMET! on CUPID! on, DONNER and BLITZEN!”
Like many families, we had our peculiar Christmas quirks. Every year, my mother would wrap a hideous plastic Santa wreath with a For JOE From SANTA label on it, and my father would open it, seemingly unaware that he was falling again for the old running gag. It always cracked us up. Every year, my penny-pinching father would wait until the night before Christmas to buy a tree at fire sale prices. Every year, we decorated the antlers of the mounted moose head above the piano with bulbs and tinsel.
I didn’t know it at the time – and nobody explained it to me – but Christmas was about family and tradition and where my place was within the charmed circle. Living at home with no major disruptions – no deaths, divorce, or estrangement – I fashioned an illusory continuity that I maintained through my college and young adult years.
An expatriate period followed. I no longer lived near my family and couldn’t go home. My Christmas nostalgia peaked, and in a dark studio apartment of a gritty working-class suburb of Paris, I penned my longing memories of home, which became the basis of the podcast “Xmas.”
I returned to the States, the Midwest and the East Coast, but the horrors of traveling cross country during the holidays reoriented me towards celebrating Christmas with an adopted family based in Pittsburgh.
My mother found out I was gay, and I no longer had a place within the charmed circle. Then she died, and my father remarried. My older brother estranged himself from the family, and my younger sister joined a cult. There was no more charmed circle. But my older sister encouraged me to live near her. She helped me buy an Oakland home, and with that as a base, I set about to reproduce my own Christmas. I bought a Christmas tree stand and a fresh fir every December, and my cache of ornaments grew. I purchased Christmas gifts, wrapped them, and sent out Christmas cards for a while, although that was the first of the traditions to go.
I had a house, a tree, and sometimes a boyfriend, but I often woke up by myself on Christmas day. Still I persisted with the rituals until my last boyfriend sat on the living room couch, crossed his arms, and refused to join me in trimming the tree. “Who am I doing this for?” I thought. “There’s no joy in it.”
And just like that, I unplugged from Christmas. There were no more trees. The ornaments stayed packed up. If I felt like it, I sent Christmas cards to those who had sent them first, and that number diminished over the years. I explained to the people I cared about that I didn’t want any presents and wasn’t going to engage in a Christmas gift exchange ever again. They didn’t care, and what a liberation!
From then on I could cherry-pick my Christmas experiences – a Nutcracker here, a choral concert there. There were still parties, dinners, and social gatherings, but none represented a referendum on my popularity or intrinsic worth. I could take it or leave it – all of it!
So I enjoy Christmas because there’s nothing at stake for me. I have my memories of childhood Christmases, and I know damn well that they’re rose-colored fabrications. So what? I’m beyond trying to recapture that past. And if I want to experience the good old-fashioned Christmas that set such an impossibly high bar, I can stream Miracle on 34th Street to my heart’s content.
Happy holidays.
– Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Christmas Clobbers Hanukkah
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