Making Christmas make sense

How does an anti-consumerist atheist celebrate at this time of year?

The good thing about having to explain Christmas to my kids every year is that I get a lot of practice trying to figure out what it means. The twin pillars of the mainstream Caucasian Christmas experience are Santa and the baby Jesus, which creates some yuletide wrinkles for an anti-consumerist atheist such as myself. What, exactly, am I celebrating? Is it hypocritical to celebrate at all?

The youngest of our children still ask what’s up with Santa Claus — they forget the finer points of our explanations from previous years. We tell them that we don’t particularly like a fantasy wherein a white man has so much power he can whiz around the planet making deliveries to all the children of the world in one night, and yet, when there are so many children who need a home, medicine and/or food, he delivers a toy. WTF, Santa? And what about the kids with parents who are poor or absent and can’t supply a gift “from Santa” — are they naughty instead of nice?

And when they ask about Jesus we take much the same tack: if Jesus loves us all, why do so many suffer? If the Lord provides, why are so many being driven from their homes and starving? What, they weren’t faithful enough? It doesn’t make sense to us.

So how does Christmas make sense to a family like ours? How do we locate ourselves and our beliefs (if, indeed, we have any) in the season?

I think the answer might lie in some historical research.

Humans have long made a habit of feasting in the late fall, to celebrate the end of the harvest and a time of plenty even after the cold and the dark have descended. The ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia — a pagan winter solstice festival — and decorated their homes with evergreen wreaths, an early predecessor of the Christmas tree. For thousands of years, we’ve done things like this to celebrate human tenacity — our ability to live through fallow times and persevere through the seasons like the green of the fir tree.

The worship of evergreen trees as symbols of eternal life can be traced back to ancient Egyptian, Chinese and Hebrew cultures. The Vikings and Saxons were tree worshippers; their story about St. Boniface and Donar’s Oak led to later Western folklore about evergreens being triangles reflecting the Holy Trinity, sprouting up like arrows pointing to heaven and everlasting life.

In medieval times, the “Tree of Life” mystery play about Adam and Eve was performed on Dec. 24: its set was a tree decorated with apples. Once people started putting up trees in their own homes, they used red balls to decorate the boughs instead of apples. Despite our fall from grace, despite our eviction from the Garden of Eden, we persevere, and the apples are a reminder. Again, it comes down to our desire to celebrate humanity and our hope for eternal life, despite all the struggles we endure.

Santa Claus as we know him is a relatively recent incarnation, only dating back about 150 years, but his origins can be linked to this same impulse we seem to have, to celebrate humanity against all odds. St. Nick is a modernization of St. Nicholas, a third century Greek Christian who gave away his wealth to help others. One of the many stories about his generosity goes like this: young women whose families couldn’t afford dowries were at risk of being sold into slavery. Under cover of night, Nicholas drew close to their homes and threw gold pieces through a window; some of the pieces landed in shoes or stockings drying by the hearth. This is where the tradition of hanging stockings by the fire comes from. (Sometimes the story involved gold balls rather than gold coins, which led to the practice of leaving oranges in Christmas stockings.) There are many tales of Nicholas’ generosity, particularly with regards to children. We can’t know how many are rooted in reality, but we can certainly recognize our desire to celebrate those who represent the best of humanity — the kindest and most generous, the ones who recognize the suffering of others and seek to end it. It is, I think, a reflection of our impulse to celebrate light even as — especially as — the darkness closes in.

These traditions and their origins make sense to me, because they’re so very human. There’s no enchanted sleigh, no supernatural immaculate conception — just the ancient hopes and fears we’ve always had. We want to last. We want to persevere, even when the odds are against us. We want to believe that we can be good to each other. The more we are distracted by the magical and the materialistic, the further we move away from the humanity of the season.