Mosshead

finding a place for christmas

December 25th, 2005

Over the past 5 years, we have not exchanged gifts, nor decorated the house or really even recognized the passing of Christmas. It’s been an interesting experiment and I think it takes about 3 years for it to feel normal.

We stopped exchanging gifts because we wanted to decommercialize our lives.

We never were very motivated to decorate the house because we’re not christians, the holiday holds no real personal significance and we particularly wish christians would stop trying to legislate our lives … much of “christmas tradition” feels like christian cultural legislation.

I like the idea and history of Solstice and we certainly enjoy solstice parties. The tradition of casting away last years concerns and baggage is a good way to end a year I think. But despite the likely historical origins of christmas, Solstice has little to do with Christmas.

Perhaps someday, Christmas will gain significance as a traditional time for friends and family. However, we do not currently have close ties, so placing that sort of expectation on ourselves would be a little stressful. No pretensions necessary.

Which brings us back to the issue of decommercialization - so many of our expectations of ourselves and holidays are a result of 60+ years of marketing campaigns - from the nuclear family dinner to the perfectly decorated house to all those things under the tree.

Yet, despite how we feel about Christmas and what it stands for, the past couple of years we seem to have gone on a spending spree around this time of year anyway. We assure ourselves that it’s to take advantage of those fantastic sales, or because we need to buy things for the business and might as well take the deduction this year rather than next.

Interestingly it seems to me that most of the people we see out there were actually buying themselves large items (cars, beds, etc) rather than gifts for others.

Perhaps we were acting on the Christmas commercial impulse after all. It is strange that we chose to shop for a new bed, a tv, and smaller tech toys at this time of year rather than any other. No matter how I rationalize it (new bed for pregnant partner, tv for the pregnancy, small tech toys for the business) it still seems as if an autopilot took over and dictated “must buy now” impulses to my autonomic system.

So, what exactly am I rambling on about??

Well, there’s a good chance that we’ll have a munchkin next year. And after 5 years of not celebrating Christian holidays I think next year will be baby’s first christmas and our first tree.

It’s not because we’re sell-outs, certainly not because we feel we’re missing out on anything. But when we so consciously decided not to follow christian holidays, we acknowledged to each other that as humans we all need to have seasonal celebrations whatever the reason. Yet in 5 years time we’ve failed to create equivalent seasonal celebrations. (of course we’ve begun some of our own traditions like most families do, but equivalent is the keyword here)

Perhaps a greater community effort is needed. And when we’ve connected with a community of like-minded people, we’ll happily re-evaluate.

Until then - happy last un-christmas!

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