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Skipping Christmas Showed Me the Holiday Spirit

I am a Christmas nut, a secret Santa, a baker, an opulent tree decorator, keeper of the flame from three generations of Italian daughters. So it surprised the Dickens out of my family when I announced in 2008: “I NEED to skip Christmas!”

So that I am not labeled the Grinch, realize that my kids were 20 and 24. They were, I believe, secretly overjoyed to go skiing and shuffle off to visit a roommate in Mexico City. But I had embraced Christmas so hard, for so long, that every member of the family questioned me vigorously: Did I really mean this? Would I be OK with just dad and the cats? Really–no tree, no nutcrackers, no greens, no wreath?

I meant it. The first wave of the Recession had hit me hard. I was let go, in March of ‘08, from my job editing a small magazine. I continued to believe work was just around the corner. It was not; and since I had been paid as a consultant, there was no unemployment insurance. There was–and still is–no health insurance and there was–and still is–college tuition. I was bereft of Christmas spirit.

This season allows me to celebrate the simple and profound joy of having all my chicks under my roof, safe and warm, giddy or acerbic.

I found a job in April and although it only lasted until December, it came with unemployment benefits. So here I am, canned twice in the same year (with a Yale MBA, no less), and yet ready to resume Christmas.

My break from Christmas meant two years away from the trappings of the season, which actually provided a touchstone to the real meaning of the holidays. I know, as I was raised by an anthropologist mother who stressed the “stories” told by different cultures, that most people have a winter festival. We feel a need to ward off the bad feelings that come (once terrifying, now just a little depressing) as the days grow shorter and the nights longer and colder. So wise shamans, druids, priests and rabbis invented holidays where everyone could festoon their lives with lights and bring trees inside and snuggle in.

When I cut off Christmas on an economic whim, I missed out on that winter balm. Yes, the trappings are lovely, but at heart they are just a path to feeling the spirit of connectivity and solace. I adore coming into the house, dark save for twinkling lights in windows and the tree, and inhaling the aroma of home through frosty nostrils.

This year, I unpacked my treasures again. I marveled at my Grandmother’s blue China ornaments decked with sleighs and horses. I learned that I missed my mother’s collection of candelabras gathered during a marriage to a foreign correspondent.

I ached when I unpacked my children’s holiday things. For my son I purchased a nutcracker every Christmas, and now the collection encompasses everyone from Herr Drosselmeyer and the Mouse King from ballet fame, to Santas and soldiers galore. My daughter’s collection is snow globes; and as she morphed from pink princess aficionado to a young woman with wanderlust, her spheres evolved with her. There are frosted fantasies and cityscapes from NYC to Paris; and all  snow when shaken.

Who wants clementines, or goat cheese for omlettes, or fish in profusion for the traditional Italian Christmas Eve feast? This season allows me to celebrate the simple and profound joy of having all my chicks under my roof, safe and warm and alternately giddy or acerbic.

And so this year there was no begrudging, no griping about the decoration of the tree. I did all the trimming with newfound glee. We adorned the tree with every ornament from the parade of boxes my husband presented. As well as antique glass bulbs there were new family heirlooms like the cat’s paw-print, memorialized in the wet brownie we varnished. We have a collection of African American santas–chocolate Santas, as my kids call them–because my husband is a black man from D.C.

There is something to be said about taking a vacation from tradition, as it gave me a better understanding of the deep joy that twinkles and sparkles on dark winter nights. I am not embracing the economic downturn, which is turning my métier, writing, into a fairly useless, unpaid hobby. But I do embrace change as a sometimes dramatic way of pushing all of us to assess what is vital.

I am overjoyed to have Christmas back. Even in a time of continued contraction, the opulence of this season can remind us that we have a storehouse of joy residing within us. We just need to take the boxes from the shelf and let our secret Santas shine.

Tags: family, holidays, The Unemployed Life, traditions