Early this morning I came across this post about Christmas day on social media:
I feel overwhelmed with guilt that I just didn’t feel festive yesterday. My parents made the day really lovely and were so generous but I just felt really flat the entire day. Please tell me I’m not alone in this; I feel absolutely awful
As I write there are 131 replies, and every single one, excluding mine, shows solidarity with the writer.
I felt really sad.
Then it hit me.
I don’t celebrate Eid. I don’t celebrate Diwali. What IF my friends, family, television, newspapers, the shops, a government (or a dictator, God forbid) pressurise me to celebrate either of these?
As we are learning from the media, too, soon they will be cancelling “Christmas”. You can’t say that at a Christmas market. You have to call it “Winter” something or other.
On TV, while the BBC Christmas Sewing Bee* was a huge disaster, the Pottery Throwdown on ITV (correction: Channel 4) was styled as “Festive” rather than “Christmas”. And so on, and so forth.
My family of origin did not celebrate Christmas. We celebrate Chinese New Year (CNY). When I first came to work in this country I was shocked that Christmas was such a “closed shop”.
At CNY we visit friends and family. We invite people into our homes. We share food, lots of food, and red packets filled with real money, and merriment.
My first Christmas in London? I was all on my own. Everyone had gone home to their families, criss-crossing the country, as Chris Rea sings, “Driving home for Christmas”.
Why did even my best friends not invite me into their homes? Because I am not family.
Fast forward many years. Our practice now is to invite as many people as would fit around our table if we know that they were going to be on their own for whatever good or bad reason.
You see, as a family of three, we once sat down to a Christmas dinner on our own because the weather and illness had made it impossible to get to my husband’s family. We were miserable.
Since then we have collected numerous refugees (mainly from Iraq), new migrants (South Africa), friends who had recently suffered bereavement and could not face Christmas in their own home, elderly and not-so-elderly people living on their own or as a couple, young families of three, friends of friends we had invited.
Christmas is about our Christ Jesus coming to earth as a baby, Emmanuel (God becoming man). He grew up, went to the Cross to take away our sin (in the singular, because it means every single sin), and was resurrected, an event we commemorate on Easter Sunday. (Easter is not just about Easter eggs, by the way).
No birth, no death, no forgiveness.
No resurrection, no God.
Christmas to me is not about the perfect-this or perfect-that. Honestly, one thing that still hurts is mother-in-law criticising my table, laden with food, “O! You haven’t got a centrepiece. I’ll get you one next year.” Proof: I am not the perfect daughter-in-law.
I had worked so hard to get the food ready for everyone, and my reward was, “You haven’t got a centrepiece.”
Even as a Christian, those words hurt me, and I cannot imagine how many hurtful words had been said over this last Christmas.
But Christmas is precisely because we are, one and all, imperfect, sinful, and we had ‘hurt’ God (if you’d allow me to make a divine God sound like a human being). Christ came to make us “at one” with God when he later died to “at one” (atone) for that sin.
So I can understand why so many people did not feel “the vibes”, “festive”, or even sad and depressed over Christmas. We need to understand what Christmas is all about. Imperfection.
This song is one we loved singing when we went carolling in friends’ home on Christmas Eve: Christmas isn’t Christmas till it happens in your heart
May your next Christmas be a truly happy one, and, as Bing Crosby so famously sang, may your Christmas day be “merry and bright”, even when they cannot all be white!
*I really struggled with the Christmas Sewing Bee because some of the participants were using the name of “Jesus” as a swear word, most disrespectfully. Hello! The clue is in the name, “CHRISTmas”. Honestly, why did the producers not step in? Like many others, I switched off.