Holiday Rituals and Cultural Crack-Up
Seeking everyday magic in difficult times
It’s two days before Christmas, and I’m thinking back to how much I loved the lead-up to this holiday back when I was a kid growing up in the 1960s-70s. There was a set of short children’s cartoons and stop motion animations I’d watch faithfully every year – “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” were favorites. Each only aired once a season. So, I had to be careful to check the TV listings in advance, remember when each show would be on, and make sure to be in front of the TV then.
It was safe to assume that most of my friends were doing the same thing. So even if we were in our separate homes when each TV special came on in the evening, we shared the same experience nonetheless. The resulting sense of being connected with others through a common holiday ritual, which only took place once a year – but could be relied upon to happen regularly every season – was simultaneously exciting and energizing, calming and comforting.
Watching these shows was exciting and energizing because it was special, rare, and embedded in something bigger than a half-hour children’s cartoon. It was part of the return of the dark, snowy season of winter; the mysterious sense of diverse, percolating holiday traditions (being part Jewish myself and living in a culturally progressive suburb, I took it for granted that not everyone celebrated Christmas); and, of course, the lead-up to what for me was the biggest holiday of the year.
Watching these TV specials was also comforting and calming because it was so easy to become wholly absorbed and transported by them right in the familiarity of my own home. Alternatively funny, suspenseful, and poignant, these cartoon worlds reliably provided a magical moment, a sense of suspension from ordinary time. Whatever else was going on with family, friends, and school dropped away for that wholly absorbing 30 minutes – which, as a child, somehow always felt like a satisfyingly long time.
Other traditions also marked the Christmas season. Most notably, even though my parents weren’t religious at all, my Mom still took me to church regularly. Back then, it was still widely taken for granted that respectable white liberal Protestant parents would enroll their children in Sunday School, regardless of whether they themselves were believers or not. “I don’t think there’s some God up in the sky watching you brush your teeth,” my Mom would tell me. “But you need to learn those Bible stories.” It was just What One Did.
I didn’t feel any pressure to internalize any particular set of religious beliefs. My parents didn’t care as long as they thought I was being properly socialized. And the churches themselves were very much on the progressive liberal side of the cultural spectrum, easily accepting of ecumenicism and other beliefs, most certainly including secular humanism. Consequently, I felt free to absorb the symbolism and rituals – the brightly patterned stained glass windows, the cascading verses of the hymns and carols, the lighting of the Advent candles – on an imaginative, free associative level. For me, this was a tremendous gift.
I learned the structure of Bible stories and Protestant rituals. But in so doing, I took it for granted that their meanings were fluidly multifaceted and shifting. To insist on one flat, fixed, unquestionable narrative was to slam the door to deeper understanding shut. There was nothing virtuous about it. On the contrary, it was a loss, blocking any potential glimpse into deeper mysteries and truths.
Such a framework of understanding didn’t seem special at the time. It was just normal. I watched holiday cartoons and went to church. We got a Christmas tree. There was present opening in the morning and a nice dinner in the evening. It was a special day, but also, in its own way, an ordinary one. Plus, everyday life was nowhere close to any sort of bucolic, white picket fence imaginary. My family was plenty dysfunctional and there was a lot of strife. That, too, just seemed normal.
Looking back, I think I was lucky to grow up in a place and time that provided easy access to shared experiences of community and meaning without imposing any sort of one-dimensional dogma. Annual holiday events connected the realm of the sacred (lighting Advent candles at church) and the mundane (watching holiday cartoons on TV). Yet at least to me, neither felt confining or discriminatory. I knew families (including close relatives) that had different traditions and holidays. And that not only seemed fine, but interesting and enriching.
No wonder I developed such a deep identity as a progressive liberal! Growing up when and where I did, the cultural foundations for liberalism felt rock solid, and the political values of progressivism self-evidently right.
But now, looking back from such a radically different 21st-century vantage point, this once-familiar world seems like a distant foreign land: Technologically prehistoric, politically innocent, and culturally divided in ways I knew nothing about at the time. Social conditions that I experienced as natural and ordinary, and therefore presumed would last my entire lifetime (in overall spirit, not every particular) were, in fact, only a fleeting historical moment in one, very particular sort of place.
Back in 1965, Charlie Brown protested that Christmas was becoming too commercial. That’s still an issue. But the list of related concerns has grown so much longer: The erosion of spiritually nurturing traditions, the heavy-handed politicization of religion, the twisting of politics in quasi-religious dogmas, the strategic mythologizing of consumerism, and the commodification of everything, including the assiduously branded self.
The ground of society that many people assumed to be solid has been buckling, shifting, fissuring, and in some places, breaking. Many have fallen through the cracks. Still more are understandably terrified of doing so. In such a situation, it’s not surprising that a lot of people are desperate to have some sort of simple explanation of why this is happening and who is to blame. Consequently, demagogues and other political opportunists find eager audiences. Interpersonal and group conflict grows.
In such a climate, good-hearted people struggle to find a sense of trust, truth, meaning, and purpose. And there aren’t that many easily available cultural resources to help them do so – in fact, quite the contrary.
Still, the winter holidays remain a special and potentially magical time. Viewed through the right lens, they can remind us that such struggles, fears, and conflicts are by no means unique to our time. Human societies have cycled through countless periods of crisis and stability, conflict and peace, madness and calm. Many periods were much worse than what we’re experiencing now. Others were better.
Rituals like celebrating the growing return of the light after the shortest day of the year, bringing evergreen trees in the house in the middle of winter, and lighting candles in the cold darkness developed to help us navigate what’s hard with integrity and celebrate what’s good with joy. The more mundane rituals are just as important: Exchanging gifts, cooking meals, and — at least for me — watching “Charlie Brown” and “The Grinch” once more. As always, I’ll try to stay attuned to catch that fleeting sense of peace, magic, wonder, and love that Christmas offers, always and despite everything.