What is Christmas About?

Christmas is both the most celebrated and the most maligned holiday--with the possible exception of Halloween, which is pretty maligned. People frequently complain, with some justice, that they are forced to listen to Christmas jingles and ridiculous amounts of advertising for months on end. Companies and stores that start advertising Christmas all the way back to August don't help. That is, unfortunately, what Christmas has come to in many households--a blind orgy of greed and conspicuous consumption, all in the name of holiday cheer.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Don't expect this to be another scroogelike rant against Christmas or a religious screed about how Jesus wasn't born on December 25. That's not what Christmas is about and never really has been. The Christmas season isn't just Christian. It also incorporates Jewish Hannukah earlier in the month. Muslims, who revere Jesus as a prophet and his mother Mary as a saint, have much less trouble with celebrating Christmas than they do with Easter, particularly when it coincides with Ramadan, as it did just a few years ago.

Neopagans celebrate the Winter Solstice (the shortest day of the year on December 21) and some Christmas customs hark back to ancient celebrations like the Roman Saturnalia, in which the social order of society was turned upside down for a week. This is a holiday on which all religions in the Northern Hemisphere can more or less agree.

Christmas is an opportunity to relearn one's spirituality, to relearn how to be a good person, someone who leaves this planet a little better off when he or she leaves it. I don't think that one month, or even two or three, is too long a time to figure that out.

In our stressed-out, consumerism-obsessed world, we too often forget that the opportunities to better ourselves surround us at Christmas. But as with everything that is worth anything, we have to work at it. Yes, the rates of depression, family crises and suicides of lonely people with no support networks go up in this literally darkest of months. But one way to get around this is to recognize what Christmas used to be about--beating back the darkness for a month or so of celebration before the lean times began in February and building up a well of goodwill from which people could draw when cabin fever set in.

To this end, gift giving, card writing and sending, Christmas caroling, visiting friends and relatives, volunteering, parties and Christmas religious services help in the search for rediscovering one's spirituality. The din and cry of Christmas don't have to mask a ringing emptiness, but instead can raise up a deeper meaning to life and strengthen our connections to others. In giving gifts, we can think about the needs of others beside ourselves.

In volunteering at shelters, be they for humans or animals, we can try to help those less fortunate than ourselves at the holidays. In going caroling, sending Christmas cards full of news and good wishes and visiting, we can rekindle old friendships or create new ones.

In attending religious services, whatever those may be, we can rediscover the comforts of ritual for creating a spiritual center inside ourselves. In trying to be nice to someone we don't much like, just because "'tis the season", we can find a way to reconcile old hurts.

No, it's not easy. No, it doesn't always work. But when you throw away Christmas wholesale, you suddenly discover why such a wide variety of traditions over such a broad stretch of the calendar exists. It's a cold, dark, lonely winter without them. From a very practical viewpoint, these traditions were created so that we wouldn't be at each other's throats by February. By reaffirming what can be good about human beings, about the heights that we can reach if only we try, these traditions build up our goodwill and cheer for when we need them most. There's nothing wrong with that.