My Troubled History With Christmas
(Por la versión en Español, visita aquí.)
For many years, Christmas has been a difficult and sometimes very lonely holiday for me, both politically and emotionally.
My dad was a lapsed Catholic who still pined for the church of his sainted mother, while my mother was a non-denominational but always anti-Catholic Protestant, even opposing John F. Kennedy as a presidential candidate because of his Catholicism.
During my years away from home at university, my mother became a Jehovah’s Witness. I quickly learned that Witnesses are not only virulently anti-Christmas, but equally anti-Catholic, adding to the already murky subliminal motivation for her conversion.
Witnesses reject any kind of “pagan” celebration, including regular birthdays, Easter, civic holidays, etc. Regarding Christmas, their contention is that the Catholic church arbitrarily picked a fake birthdate for Christ, who they say never instructed his followers to celebrate his birthday anyway, then incorporated a bunch of pagan rituals from Babylon and elsewhere. This apostasy was foisted on the Catholic flock, and eventually the world. For Witnesses, it is a diabolical holiday.
Although my mother has earned a place in heaven for her selfless at-home care of my dad during his 15 month battle with colon cancer many years ago, it is also true that this conversion to an anti-Catholic religion was a thorn in his side until the day of his death. And it destroyed any hope any of us might have harbored for a “normal” holiday. Every Christmas since, I have been a kind of holiday homeless person, right up to the current day.
This is not always fun. I’ve spent Christmas alone with a broken heart after a painful breakup, listened to holiday carols lilting through the evening air while sitting by myself sipping Malbec in a tiny studio in Buenos Aires and grappled with a crushing intrusion of reality in my deliciously confusing relationship with a vibrantly alive and enormously talented young opera singer in Mexico.
I usually spend Christmas with friends and their families. The past few years, my dear friends the Tanenbaums, Jews who nonetheless celebrate the holidays with a lavish Christmas dinner every year at their home in Beverly Hills, have been kind enough to include me in the festivities. It is always a joy to be with them, a united family sticking together even in the face of all the forces pulling modern families apart, which is something I have missed above all else.
I have been traveling worldwide since August, 2016, through 12 countries and 18 cities, working on and doing research for the Reimagining Politics project. Last year, I spent a traditional Argentine Christmas with my beautiful friend Paola and her welcoming family in a remote barrio far outside Buenos Aires. I have never felt more welcomed nor with greater warmth.
This year, I am in a tiny fishing village on the Pacific coast of Mexico sharing Christmas with my dear friend Ana Paula and her delightful family. At Christmas dinner last night, we talked about a looming conflict over the dehumanizing effects of financialized capitalism represented by the US and China and wondered who would lead the world, and in what direction, absent these two countries with their environmentally destructive and seemingly unsustainable economic models.
Which brings me back to Christmas. I am not a Jehovah’s Witness and have little use for the ways in which their warped creed tears families apart. Yet there are ways in which I agree with their position on Christmas, although for very different reasons.
I have always loved the passage from Luke 2:14 more than the popular Longfellow song in which it is endlessly cited — “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” (King James Bible)
The reality of Christmas as a $3 trillion, months long orgy of consumer spending, just in the US, accounting for nearly 20% of annual retail sales, and in which the average consumer spends twice as much on year-end gifts as on year-end charitable giving, flies in the face of everything in this Bible verse.
I want, and am working hard for, a kind of year round Christmas in which we honor the earth that sustains us while celebrating and working for peace on earth, goodwill toward men and women of all creeds and colors.
In the interim, I cherish my wonderful friends around the world who have kept me emotionally afloat, and often joyously buoyed, for so many Christmases past and present.
Thank you.
NOTE: Michael is the founder of Reimagining Politics at http://ReimaginingPolitics.org. He is available for public speaking engagements, university roundtable events or to teach university seminars on new kinds of civic innovation occurring round the world. He can be reached at michael@reimaginingpolitics.org. Michael’s full bio can be read here. This story is copyrighted by Michael Meurer, Reimagining Politics, and first appeared in both English and Spanish on the Reimagining Politics blog here.
