Why I hate Christmas
After years of struggle, I have resigned myself to accepting that my First Amendment rights seem to end when the Christmas season begins.
I don’t really care about how other people partake in this tradition. I do, however, really get tired of having to justify my lack of enthusiasm for Christmas every year and having my name changed to Scrooge Reyna.
You risk a lot when you don’t like Christmas.
In conversation, people who only minutes before were friends suddenly question the value of that friendship as they ask, “What do you mean you don’t celebrate Christmas!”
Part of the problem is that I am one of those cynical people who resist participating in an activity just because it is a tradition or it is what’s expected.
Today, the health of the country’s economy depends on the expectation that everyone will be running to the mall or the Internet to buy gifts, and everyone will be eating and drinking a lot and traveling to be with family.
Afterward we spend the New Year dieting, complaining about how stressful holidays are and paying off all of the accumulated credit card debt.
Yet I am scorned for not wanting to take part in this ritual. One year, I turned my cynicism into activism and decided to organize an “I Hate Christmas” club. It was a way to find out whether I was the only one who longed to resist tradition.
Much to my surprise, I started getting calls from people who wanted to join. It was short-lived because most of my confederates were closet Christmas-haters who didn’t want to risk public exposure.
Another time, I made a “Stop Santa” button and wore it before the holidays. I must confess that I began to fear for my life every time I walked into a store. I’ve never received so many dirty looks or been treated like such a criminal. One cashier in particular became very agitated and yelled at the top of her voice, “What do you mean
you want to stop Santa!” Maybe I went a bit too far that time.
As I grow older, I cope with Christmas in a less confrontational and more intellectual fashion. I continue to read books about how the tradition started, both in Europe and the United States. It is a fascinating history.
There are marked similarities between Christmas and the pre-Christian Roman feast to the god Saturn, held on Dec. 17. The Saturnalia was like a Mardi Gras, with lots of drinking and eating. It was followed by the New Year’s, or Kalend, festival, in which houses were “decorated with lights and greenery, and people exchanged gifts.”
The Roman emperor Caligula, much to the disgust of his subjects, required them to give him presents; he waited on the porch of his palace to receive them.
These traditions are chronicled by British historian Clement Miles, who studied extensively how pre-Christian winter solstice festivals were metamorphosed into what we now call Christmas in his book “Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan,” first published in 1912.
Stephen Nissenbaum, another historian, provides an account of the development of Christmas in New England in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” He writes how the Puritans, to stop Mardi Gras-type revelry, banned Christmas celebrations in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.
The way we now celebrate Christmas was the creation of a few upper-class New Yorkers, in the middle of the 19th century. At that time, Christmas celebrations gave license to rowdy lower-class revelers to drink and sing in the streets, and to invade wealthy people’s homes.
This also followed the Saturnalia tradition. According to Lucian of Samosata, during the Saturnalia, “All men shall be equal, slave and free, rich and poor, one with another.” The rich and the poor were expected to exchange presents in ancient times, and the rich were to serve the slaves.
This tradition, however, had become so dangerous for the wealthy by the 19th century that landed gentry, including Washington Irving and Clement Moore, conspired to create a more tranquil and domestic tradition, celebrating Christmas inside homes to protect themselves and their families.
Christmas is the one time of the year when our socioeconomic class differences become most apparent. Children, regardless of their economic background, are watching the same TV Christmas commercials and want the same expensive toys.
I have always considered Christmas to be a class act, not because it’s elegant, but because how it serves to divide our society even more. We feel so pious because we can donate toys and coats to the less fortunate. But until I read those books, I wasn’t aware of how right I had been about Christmas.
From now on I’ll just say, “I follow the Puritan tradition.”