dreaming of a white christmas

I was reading on the Iceland Weather Report about the onset of advent and how it is marked in Iceland.

It made me start to think about how little I bother with Christmas, even now that we have kids. It’s hard to tell how accurate this is, but I seem to remember enjoying it more before we came to the US. Some of that is doubtless tied to my being 11 at the time, which is something of a transition point in life, but I think it’s also to do with the cultural tone.

The central paradox, to my mind, is that while Holland (where we lived for 6 years before the US) and the UK are (or were) less overtly observant of the various Christian traditions, the cultural components of Christmas were more embedded than in the US.

When I was a kid in Holland, for instance, we had Advent calendars, chocolate Sinte Klaases, put out clogs, got presents on the fifth, etc. Then we would go back to the UK to visit family and have that kind of Christmas. (I would make out like a bandit under this system, since my birthday is right before Christmas, and we would visit both sets of grandparents, thereby ensuring at least 4 paydays in one crazed month of greed).

After we moved to the US, it didn’t quite work out the same way. That was partly because, freed from the usual habits, we couldn’t quite work out what to do. Our first Christmas in California, it was nearly 80 F / 26.5 C so we celebrated by going in the pool in the back yard. There was one stretch, much later, when my brother was a vegan so we would have home-made Indian food for Christmas dinner: our mother couldn’t work out how to make a traditional x-mas dinner that was at all vegetarian so she taught herself how to make various dishes from scratch (I really enjoyed that stage).

After over 20 years now, I think that part of it is that there’s no real cultural commonality in the States, certainly not in the sense that there was in Holland in the 70s—although it seems those days are long gone. It’s not that the US isn’t heavily Christian—in fact the religiosity is far greater, but I don’t live in an area homogeneous enough for that to show. The rampant consumerism has a reductive effect also. Still, at least there’s not the annual embarrassment of Zwarte Piet. But whatever the root cause, there's just not the commonality (which is fine).

I also married someone for whom Christmas was occasionally fraught, between balancing relatives after her parents divorced and also balancing competing traditions as well.

With that in mind, now the wife and I are trying to work out what to do—if anything—with the kids. We don’t really decorate the house, and we don’t have room, or aren’t willing to put room aside, for a tree. L thinks that Santa is a life-sized doll that the neighbours across the street put on their porch every December and has no idea that some children think he brings the presents. And the various in-laws have all gathered for Thanksgiving and set their plans to avoid one another at Christmas…

So I suppose it’s about us, as a family, just having a quiet day together. Nothing wrong with that, actually.