I really don't "get" Christmas

This is the day that so much of "normal" American society celebrates as Christmas. It is a part of the religious tradition within which I was raised. It is not foreign to me in any sense. Yet, I am increasingly baffled and bemused by it, and, this year in particular, put off by it -- even a bit incensed and offended.

Part of that comes, this year, from the still fresh pain of the November presidential elections, and the implications of those elections in terms of American "culture" -- that brooding sense that there are GOOD folks (defined as conservative, right wing, fundamentalist Christians of a certain stripe) and then all the rest of us... For someone, like me, who has spent a lifetime as a feminist, a pacifist, a person who lives in an alternative lifestyle family, a person with friends and family members who are gays and lesbians, who is not sure that the Christ myth is THE TRUTH, who finds more questions than answers in the "scriptural" writings of the world, the world has gotten pretty unjustifiably black and white and, frankly, darned scary and unwelcoming. If you want the honest truth, it makes me mad as hell.

So, all this fuss over the supposed birthdate of the historical person, Jesus, who started (although I'm not convinced he intended any of what has been done in his name) all the Christian hoopla, disturbs me. All the carols and all the cards and all the twinkle lights and all the HO HO HO and all the rush to buy gifts and decorate and party -- I've viewed through jaundiced eyes. Seems I've grown more and more attached to my sense of connection to all the parts and pieces of the universe, and through that, connection to the Divine Creative Force, which I sense is the IT we all know as GOD. If there was, at some point in time, as so many cultures insist on telling it, a savior born of a virgin in some miraculous fashion, and come to live among us, as one of us, my question would be, "why -- to what purpose?"

And so I am not merely a "Grinch" or a "Scrooge," but much more fundamentally, a non-participant in the Christmas "thing" from a philosophical point of view. I go along socially, because it is what my "family" does, but I find it wearing and draining and annoying. It is another level of personal dishonesty and hiddeness that does not fit. It wears badly, like a shoe that is too tight.

Tonight, though, it is at an end. We are all home, tucked in warm and comfortable and together. It has been a difficult and dark and snowy and bitter cold few days. My heart has struggled and my mind has bridled and I've cried alone in the long hours of the night with sorrows and fears that are for another day. For now, it is enough to find us all three, warm and loved and safe here together.