Christmas Spirit
22 December 2004
So, if I remember right, there’s this holiday coming up and for lots of people it’s a pretty big deal. If I look around, I see it: There are strings of lights hanging in windows that aren’t normally there, food stuffs for sale that only appear once a year, and department stores that are more crowded than usual.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way I kind of abandoned Christmas. I didn’t do it because I’m not religious (though I’m not) or because I was fed-up with the rampant commercialization of the season (though I was).
When I think about it, the signs were there the last few years I celebrated Christmas. Instead of growing, each year the list of people for whom I bought presents shrunk. Even though I had a couple of weeks off each year during the holidays, I spent less time on the road traveling back and forth to stay with my family and when people asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I couldn’t give them an answer. I didn’t need anything and if I wanted something I was financially capable of buying it myself. I went through the motions of attending Christmas parties and ate my share of Christmas cookies, but my Christmas spirit had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.
Then, one year, I decided that was it: I didn’t buy any presents and informed my family that instead of coming home for Christmas I was going on a vacation (which was actually spending three glorious, lazy weeks with my fiancé). Sure, Mom was disappointed, but she understood. That year my fiancé and I agreed that since we didn’t really care that much about it, we didn’t need to celebrate Christmas. And so we didn’t. Before that, the last holiday season that I remembered that was so refreshing and carefree was from my childhood.
Now, three years later, I am married to my then-fiancé and since we live far away from our families, we prefer to stay home during these crowded, over-traveled days and celebrate Christmas the way we did that first year: by doing nothing more than wishing each other a Merry Christmas and calling our families to remind them that even though we are not there, we still love them… which is the true Christmas spirit after all, isn’t it?
