The Habit of Christmas

In a past life, this time of year would've found the house flooded with Christmas cards - brief flashes of greetings and good wishes from long lost friends and out of touch family, acquaintances, and car salesmen - to be read, displayed, and then discarded with the seasonal decorations until the next year. When I came to feel that Christmas cards had become an obligation I stopped sending them and not surprisingly stopped receiving them. Some old habits are as hard to fall back into as they are to break. Each year I rethink this but the thought of sitting and addressing cards, retrieving old addresses, and trying not to neglect anyone is all more than I care to take on. It feels almost false, a transparent effort to be proper and seasonly sincere. Oscar Wilde or someone like him said "Sincerity is an art. Once you've mastered it, everything else is easy." So the cards will go unwritten and the house will go undecorated another year. I think of a customer I once had who ordered her Christmas cards in October, 1000 of them. When I congratulated her on being early and so organized, she explained that her maid needed the extra time to write them out for her. Small wonder Christmas sometimes makes me cringe. Meanwhile, I will enjoy what cards do arrive, make an effort to answer them, and try to get past the guilt. The spirit of the season remains in my heart, it's just the trappings I do without.

Sometimes I look at the sky and try to understand infinity but I can't imagine it and am sure that if I could throw a rock hard enough and long enough, that it would hit the blue ceiling and bounce back to earth. Or perhaps the sky is held up by invisible tent poles, that somehow we are encapsulated like a ship in a bottle. Never ending-ness simply does not compute to me. And so it is with the Christmas season, as if we have forgotten the reason for all the celebrating and buried the real meaning under a pile of credit card debt and brightly wrapped presents. We all comprehend materalism well enough and for too many of us, Christmas has become the last chance at business success and nothing more. There is irony in the ringing of cash registers with "O, Holy Night" playing in the background. There are those among us who see gift giving not as a holiday tradition but as a competition to be won or lost on Christmas morning.

I like the catch up letters that often come with cards these days. A year's worth of a life is highlighted, summarized, and capsuled for instant reading and you are brought current for the price of a stamp. The letters can be sad or funny or nostalgic, filled with surprises or as dull as yesterdays news, but all bring updates on who has been born or died or married, moved, graduated or gone to Europe, had this or that surgery, gotten divorced, gone broke, found God or entered rehab. '

For me, there is salvation and Christmas spirit in the carols, the children, and the music of Hayden.