Permanently Cancelling Christmas
The solstice, Jesus, and the emerging world.
By Tess GC
I’ve always loved thinking up gifts at Christmas, and sending cards to all my friends and huge family. This year, my plans to whip up a big stack of cards just didn’t happen. I kept waiting to feel like doing it, and I haven’t. I’ve only really found myself able to think of something meaningful to say to the people who have held me, struggled with me, mourned with me, watched the world with me for the past year.
The news has gone around that Christmas is cancelled in Bethlehem. It’s odd, because it sure seems like Christmas being cancelled makes it look a lot like the event that led to this Christian holiday. As Pastor Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem says, standing in front of a manger made of the rubble of Palestine, “Jesus was born amongst the occupied.” At its most real, the Christian Christmas has always been this cancelled version.
I usually have a bifurcated experience of Christmas, having a hard time reconciling the bright red and green joy of Christmas with a child being born into some pretty tough circumstances — to a mom who didn’t choose to become pregnant, and a dad who’s just trying to come to terms with what’s happening, both of them poor Israelites in an occupied territory. I think the clarity that ‘cancelled Christmas’ brings has suddenly made my feeling about Christmas clear, and I don’t think it will ever be the same. Christmas is one of those events where joy shines through the mountain of fear and despair, but fear and despair that are there nonetheless; where joy shines through the cracks in the rubble, while the rubble presses in, nonetheless.
Watching the grotesque display as the usual suspects go about their Christmas charades this year — rich people, and government officials actively encouraging a genocide to name a couple — gives us a chance to really immerse ourselves, with eyes open, in the origins of Christmas: On the one hand, the story of the birth of the least of these, who would grow up to change the world; and on the other, cross-cultural, age-old celebrations of the darkest nights, honoring the dark, and praying for a return of the sun and the light, the winter solstice.
Christianity has been very good at accommodating itself to millennia-old, pre-Christian traditions, and those stories are right under the surface of Christian holidays. I come from an Irish American family, and I’ve found a lot of grounding in the solstice observations that have grown out of pre-Christian Ireland and Britain. I’ve also found that grounding myself in the solstice at this time of year has made the Jesus story even more meaningful, how people pray and have prayed, not just for the sun, but for liberation from their oppressors.
So I don’t feel totally devoid of the Christmas feeling this year. I actually feel it more authentically and deeply that I often do, and that makes me really hopeful. Someone I look up to and consider a spiritual teacher talks about how we’re in an in-between time — the old world has been dying away, we’re living through the pain of that, and we don’t yet know what is emerging. I really believe that there’s a reason each of us is living now. We can equip ourselves to live through it, embrace it, and give our all to shape our part of the world in the paradigm that is emerging around and within us.
I hope you all can find some of the hope that lives in despair this season, and not punish yourselves for often not knowing what to do or how to do it. There’s a lot more to come, and we’re building our capacities to fight for the kind of lives we want to live. In the words of Dylan Thomas,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Thank you! I get the calls to cancel Christmas but I feel like the call is more nuanced then what it may be interpreted as, which would be to not celebrate at all. I think what the call to cancel is the overt and gross commodification of it, the white washing and the amnesia around the fact that we are celebrating a refugee middle eastern couple was desperately trying to seek shelter giving birth to light in a very dark time. We see this happening with Palestine now- I often see people see people saying that Palestinians are changing the world right now, and that's very in line with Christmas. That's the essence of what we need to celebrate at its core. I think we're heading in a very good direction, shedding all the BS- even thought it will be light passing through a birth canal- so painful and scary, to do. But just like a birthing mother can't stop pushing their baby through, we can't turn back. There's no turning back. So that's what we're celebrating- birthing a new concept of our faith from its roots. It's beautiful.