Sherry Chandler

For two years now, I’ve done Christmas on my own terms – very simply. I haven’t darkened the door of a department store or a major chain. I haven’t charged anything on credit cards. I haven’t festooned my home with glittering plastic. I haven’t put pressure on my kids to “come home for Christmas.” I find it very liberating. And it’s getting easier.

I guess I have a very contrarian streak but I don’t like crowds and I don’t like parties, unless it’s half a dozen poets with a bottle of wine. My preferred celebratory meal is bread and cheese and olives. And most of all, I don’t like the frenzy of spending that Christmas has become. When my children were little, I was appalled at the greediness Christmas bred in them. They didn’t get that at home. They picked it up at school, from the culture, from the very air, I suppose. Now that they are grown and see what the American way of Christmas can do to a budget, they understand a little better.

Now there’s all this “war on Christmas” nonsense, a total construct of the chatterers, that has even my poet friends apologizing for saying Merry Christmas. Or not saying Merry Christmas.

So here are some contrarians words from Northrop Frye to contemplate on this Christmas eve:

…Christmas, as the Puritans kept insisting, never was primarily Christian. Its Germanic Romantic framework expressed a pastoral myth centripetal in shape, the large family installed in a big home eating huge amounts of food, which seems oddly in contrast with this very centrifugal civilization.
…

Our society lacks festivals: our Christmas is an introverted German Romantic affiar, & its Dickensian propaganda assumes a retreat into the cavernous depths of the middle-class family.

— from Northrop Frye Unbuttoned. Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries (Gnomon 2004)

If you doubt Frye’s assessment, consider that the megachurches are not holding services on this rare Sunday Christmas but are dismissing so that their members can spend time with their families.

God bless us every one.