Dec 28, 2008 - 04:05:16 CST
If your experience is similar to mine, "the Christmas spirit" is not something that comes automatically on the heels of Thanksgiving. In fact, as I grow older, I find that getting into the Christmas spirit is a bit like getting into the clothes you wore to the senior prom. It can be done, but at serious cost to the human spirit. And don't look in the mirror.This year, I feared that I would never get into the spirit.
We all know the truth. Christmas is better when it is simpler and less materialistic. When we slow down and smell the cinnamon. When somehow the birth of Christ gets to stay somewhere in the equation. When we give ourselves the gift of singing. When we sit by the light of the fireplace or the Christmas tree and talk in quiet sincerity with those we love.
So, just to make sure we don't become complacent with that serene picture of love and family and Christ, we Americans have somehow transformed Christmas into a monthlong decathlon of shopping, partying, decorating, shipping, drinking, cooking, baking, gift-wrapping, gift-delivering, gift-exchanging and gift-returning, not to mention re-gifting. Forty percent of all retail commerce occurs around Christmas.
Perhaps because this Christmas season began with a man being trampled to death in a Long Island Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving, I had a particularly hard time getting into the festive mood. I've been unusually busy this fall, and by the time I started to get serious about Christmas, it was bearing down on us like a freight train. The only thing worse than the Christmas rush is the Christmas desperate scramble.
In a moment of madness, I decided to make most of my gifts this year. That always sounds so wholesome and enlightened at the moment of conception. Then, on the 20th of December or so, you find yourself pacing the canyons of Wal-Mart alone at 3 a.m., looking for replacement glue sticks and glitter paint, and asking a bewildered nocturnal stock clerk whether Goop or epoxy is better for gluing a baby food jar Christmas tree into place on green-painted plywood. By the time I had finished my gifts, my whole house had been transformed into a small but inefficient industrial assembly line. There was no need for egg nog - I did not want it to interfere with my glue and varnish buzz.
When it was all over, in the light of day, all those homemade gifts looked really ... homemade.
A few days before Christmas, I drove down to northwestern Kansas to see my daughter, who is now 14. It was 15 below zero as I turned south at Sterling. The day had begun with a jump start and a new Die Hard "double-extreme, Arctic Blast" battery, and bloody knuckles, too, because I had perversely refused to let the Sears crew install it. It warmed up two degrees every hundred miles of the trip, but the wind was a grim, grinding constant for all 751 miles.
The wind was so violent and unrelenting that it felt as if the entire Great Plains were about to be overturned, like a tumbleweed, into the Midwest. I had to grip the steering wheel with both hands just to stay on the road. When I met the big 18-wheelers on the narrow stretches of the highway, I had to prepare for the double wallop, first when the big rig created a temporary wind screen for my car and nearly sucked me into the vortex of the trailer, and then when it cut me loose, like a sledge hammer, back into the storm.
By the time I got to my daughter's village, I was brain-numb from the road, and my arms were actually sore from fighting the wind.
My daughter is a freshman in high school, now in the era of Paris Hilton. On most days she is still three parts girl to one part young woman, but she is definitely no longer the child of my Christmas fantasy, breathlessly waiting for the thump of Santa Claus on the roof, leaping out of bed like a Seuss character to see what's under the tree. She has been proficient on a computer keyboard since she was 6. She spends as much time on the parallel planet of Facebook as I do checking my e-mail. She has never known a world without media saturation. When I try to explain to her that when I was a child we had only two television stations and no cable, she can almost comprehend it, but when I tell her we had to get up to change the channel - well, she's just not buying that. She has reached that moment in her life when toys are no longer acceptable gifts. She wants clothes. She wants makeup. She wants iTunes credit lines. She wants a Netflix account. Ho ho ho.
Whenever I walk past an Easy Bake Oven, I just want to throw it into my jumbo shopping cart. Why can't I buy Legos or a red wagon or even Barbie doll accessories anymore? Clothes? Who wants to buy his beloved child clothes? Or makeup? Why would I encourage the advent of the makeup phase of her adolescence? I don't know much, but I know this much with certainty: Any clothes I purchase without having been given the precise size, color and catalog number are going to be unceremoniously exchanged on Dec. 26 for what she really wanted. And if I am merely the credit card for items precisely specified and pre-inspected by her, how is that Christmas in any meaningful sense of the term?
On the evening of my arrival in Kansas, after a drive of 14 hours on roads that were not icy, but - much worse - intermittently icy, my daughter and I were informed that we wanted to go to the Christmas program at the church. Given my exhaustion and the limited amount of time I had to spend with my child, I was not eager to attend the service.
We attended the service.
It was an evening of singing, readings from sentimental Christmas stories and skits. At times it felt like a cross between a Christmas pageant and a karaoke evening at a non-alcoholic community center.
But then my niece Mara and her friend Audra stood up in front of 200 people in a Methodist church in a village in Kansas and sang "O Holy Night" a cappella.
Before they were two lines in, I burst into tears. Their pure thin voices, the magnificent lyrics of the hymn, that lovely elusive idea of human redemption, the solemnity of the church, the sudden memory of my grandfather Diedrich singing "Silent Night" in German in a church in Fergus Falls, Minn., when I was 7 and life was still magic - all that simply trumped the secular insanity of the season and restored me to life.
I took out the pew Bible and opened to Luke 2:1. "And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out ... "
Now I was ready for Christmas.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
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