Holidays, posthumously

A couple years ago, Bill McKibben, known for his excellent writings on nature and the environment, penned a slim but meaningful little book called Hundred Dollar Holiday in which he makes a case for a less materialistic approach to Christmas. I only heard about the book a month or so ago, and it really struck a chord with me, thinking as I was about the first Christmas we were to spend with my daughter. Christmas has always been a time of great joy in my family and every year I look anxiously forward to the holiday season, which always makes me feel full of contentment, good will, and hope. The problem, though, was that we were planning on spending Christmas with my parents, who have a break-the-bank policy when it comes to holiday gift giving. Their generosity is magnificent and I appreciate the love that finds its expression in the package avalanche, but an avalanche it still is, and that's not something my husband and I are comfortable raising our daughter with. It's been hard to talk to my folks about this, since their "stuff is love" understanding makes them see the lack thereof as something stingy and Grinch-ish and criticizing it makes me feel like an ungrateful wretch (I'm not). It isn't that we want our child to have nothing, but I want to be sure she doesn't get the idea - at Christmas or at any time - that meaning is conveyed by "stuff." I want her to know the season for the best it has to offer, as a time of family togetherness and joy taken in the simpler pleasures. She was really too young this year for that to matter much, but it still seemed important to lay the philosophical groundwork for what my husband and I hope to share with our little girl.

As it turns out, Fate took matters in hand... My parents' house was burglarized while they were away (ironically as they were with us for our daughter's birth), and one of the things stolen was the Christmas gift fund. It made me sad to see their disappointment at not being able to have the "first Christmas with the granddaughter" they had envisioned, but at the same time I felt relieved that the materialistic aspects of that celebration were, of necessity, going to be curtailed. My daughter got a few gifts, and we each got a small amount of spending money, but the main pleasure of our time together was had in baking, eating, visiting with kinfolk and friends, and in the joy of admiring the newest addition to the family. It was quality time, and I doubt anyone really missed the tons of presents we usually have. I know I didn't.

Calls for an anti-consumer Christmas are nothing new, but McKibben somehow manages to put that across without a lot of the bah-humbuggery that usually accompanies similar critiques. He offers, instead, a way for us to re-envision traditions in the spirit of the season. Here's a quote:

"Our strategy with Christmas, then, has gone slightly awry. We've gotten used to spending more money to make it special. But if money's no longer as valuable as time, we're offering each other a devalued currency. If you spend ten or twenty hours buying Christmas presents each year, you could use the same ten or twenty hours to make presents--time that you'd be able to spend with children, spouses, friends."

My daughter is going to be old enough next Christmas for this to really start making an impact, so that gives us a year to work on making a plan for how we want it to unfold and then pitch it to those who will share the holiday with us. I'm making a pledge to myself now that we will make the majority of our gifts next season, and I'm going to start now with drawing up a project list and thinking ahead about how to make it happen. It will be interesting to see how our own Christmas traditions develop as a family, and I think this is a great place to start. I'll close the same way McKibben did:

"But the greatest cost may be the way it's changed us, the way it has managed to confuse us about what we really want from the world. We weren't built just for this life we find ourselves leading--we were built for silence and solitude, built for connection with each other and the natural world, built for so much more than we now settle for. Christmas is the moment to sense that, the moment to reach for the real joys."