Tag Archives: Holidays

Photo by Lotus Head from Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa.

I originally wrote this post in September of 2013, but I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people wondering how they can celebrate the holidays without doing a gift exchange. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I thought I’d bump up something that has remained popular.

Yes, I know Christmas is still three months away, but retailers are already beginning to receive and shelve Christmas merchandise and many people begin shopping early. If you want to join me, now is the time to begin thinking about what you’d like to do instead with your loved ones.

1. Take a Trip. It can be a two week trip to somewhere warm and sunny or a snowy weekend at a friend’s cabin in the woods. Travelling can be as thrifty or luxurious as your budget allows, and giving the gift of a new experience is a great way to ease into a no-present rule.

2. Travel Back in Time. Ok, so not literally. But you can investigate how people celebrated Christmas before the holiday became so commercialized. There have always been people who worried it was too focused on the exchange of gifts, of course, but from what I’ve read the number of gifts that were expected 100 years ago was smaller than it is today and more emphasis was placed on its religious significance as a holiday. If I was going to celebrate Christmas I’d focus on creating a delicious meal that produced so many leftovers I wouldn’t need to cook again for a week. 😉

3. Pool Your Resources to Help Someone Else. My Mennonite grandparents collected money from the entire family one year to assemble care packages for people living with HIV in Africa. The first wave of grandkids was old enough by that time that we really didn’t need a mound of presents. My grandmother loves Christmas too much to entirely get rid of her present buying habits, but we were able to slowly phase into more charitable spending patterns.

4. Play. Bring board games to your get together.  Go carolling.  Organize a snowball fight or snowman building contest if you live in the right climate for it.

5. Visit a Nursing Home. This may require prior planning with the director of the nursing home, but there are a lot of elderly and sick people who won’t be getting any visitors at Christmas (or at any other time of the year). I’d much rather spend Christmas visiting people who are lonely than receiving another body spray package or sweater that I’m never going to use.

 Hark! Hark to the wind! ‘Tis the night, they say,
    When all souls come back from the far away – 
    The dead, forgotten this many a day!

    And the dead remembered – ay! long and well – 
    And the little children whose spirits dwell
    In God’s green garden of asphodel.

    Have you reached the country of all content,
    0 souls we know, since the day you went
    From this time-worn world, where your years were spent?

    Would you come back to the sun and the rain,
    The sweetness, the strife, the thing we call pain,
    And then unravel life’s tangle again?

    I lean to the dark – Hush! – was it a sigh?
    Or the painted vine-leaves that rustled by?
    Or only a night-bird’s echoing cry?

“Hallowe’en” by Virna Sheard.

I’ve been thinking about the evolution of Halloween this week. A few hundred years ago, what we think of as Halloween was a religious holiday called All-hallomas. Before that there was Samhain.. Very few things in this life are unique, especially when it comes to holidays.

What was once a religious. and often solemn, holiday has been almost completely secularized. (Although I do have a few pagan friends who celebrate Samhain as part of their beliefs….)

Costumes. Candy. Very, very cheap candy in handy little single-serving packets on November 1. Cute ghost socks from the dollar store. Cheap, plastic masks that make you look like a zombie or B-movie villain.

You can believe in anything or nothing at all and still participate in this holiday.

I’m starting to think that Christmas is following in Halloween’s footsteps.

Costumes….Think santa hats and headbands that make it look like you have antlers.

Candy….Way too much of it. And it’s on sale for a lot longer than the Halloween stuff.

Cute socks from the dollar store….Yes. They’ll fall apart in January, but you can be warm and festive until then.

Masks…Ok, so we haven’t quite made it that far yet. 😉

It’s getting there though.

My theory is that secular Christmas will completely overrun the religious version of it in the mainstream media’s depiction of it within my lifetime. Individual families will still think of it in religious terms, of course, but there’s a big difference between what some people do in the privacy of their own homes (or churches) and what comes to mind for most people when they hear a certain word.

Even now it feels a little for weird to refer to Christmas as secular. Of course that’s what it is.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 10 or 20 years.

It seems unlikely at first, especially for those of us who grew up with strong Anabaptist influences.

My grandparents were and are many things: resourceful, thrifty, hospitable, humble.

What they aren’t: loud, flashy, or patriotic.

There is a quiet mistrust of the government among my Mennonite ancestors. Digging into this could fill up a post ten this length, but sufficed to say that there are reasons for their wariness.

So how, then, did they celebrate holidays that promoted values they didn’t share?

Food and fireworks.

It took me a very long time to figure out that other families thought of Memorial Day as a tribute to soldiers. My family never acknowledged that part of it. Memorial Day and the Fourth of July were about spending time with family and eating all of the good stuff that summer has to offer.

Holidays are what you make of them. You don’t have to follow the same script as everyone else.

U.S. readers, how are you celebrating Memorial Day?

Everyone else, scroll down and grin.

Source: http://themetapicture.com/i-dont-understand-the-usa/.

Revelation by Noir de Lux.

Underneath my grandmother’s piano.

Behind her couch, right next to the cabinet full of Little Golden books that my mother, aunt, and uncles grew up reading.

On the top bunk of the bed my father built for me.

Between the bushes at the public library where one of our churches held services for a year or two.

In a closet at a different church when I found a fascinating book about missionaries and decided to see if I could get away with reading it while Dad preached one Sunday night.

Inside the circular clothing racks at Walmart while mom looked for whatever it is parents need when they have three small children.

As a kid I knew all the best places to hide. I never had anyone to hide from in a dangerous sort of way, I just liked the feeling of hearing other people walk past me without noticing anything. It was quiet, it was peaceful, and I virtually always had something that I couldn’t wait to finish reading if I could find an environment with those qualities.

We didn’t celebrate Halloween for the first decade of my life due to my parents’ religious objections to it, but I was incredibly intrigued by the idea of walking around in a costume that ostensibly kept other people from knowing who you were. Until my parents changed their mind about dressing up for that holiday I found physical places to hide instead. Or at least that’s how I interpret my fascination with hiding spots now that I’m an adult.

The autumn of 1994 was the first time we were allowed to dress up for this holiday and go trick-or-treating around the neighbourhood. The only stipulation was that we weren’t allowed to have violent, gory, or satanic costumes.

I remember packing in as much Halloween fun as possible over the next couple of years. Very soon I’d be too old to trick or treat, and I wanted to savour the time I did have left for that particular ritual.

What amuses me as an adult is how little Halloween has changed. People still bemoan the violent and sexual content of the costumes. Some folks still believe that there are razor blades and drugs in the candy. And the holiday is still about what is hidden and what is revealed.

But for one day of the year most people feel total freedom to express themselves. Some do it by picking costumes far more revealing or

Photo by istolethetv from Hong Kong, China.

controversial than they’d normally dare to wear in public. Others use Halloween as an excuse to hide their true identities. They might dress up as someone unrecognizable or pretend to be someone who doesn’t actually match with their values.

Some of the people I’ve met up here who don’t celebrate Halloween. Most of them didn’t grow up with the holiday and weren’t emotionally attached or repelled to the idea. I’d guess they see it the same way I think of Eid, the Chinese New Year, or Hannukkah. I know they exist and can provide a very brief explanation of what they’re about, but I don’t celebrate them.

A handful of very conservative and traditional Christians up here still think of Halloween as an objectively harmful celebration.  They have the right to believe that, but I do quietly shake my head at some of the consequences they fear.

This year more than ever, I suspect that everyone’s reactions to Halloween say far more about their personalities and quirks than they do the beliefs that supposedly are the basis for those opinions. Tell me how you feel about it – fearful, irritated, excited, bored, or itching for an excuse to wear something far more revealing/violent/scary than you’d ever wear the other 364 day of the year- and I’ll assume that’s how you approach life in general.