Member-only story
Doing the Holiday Our Way
No gifts, no tree, no over-eating, and no travel
I’d been too broke that year to buy gifts even though I was somehow managing to get back to the Big Annual Family Celebration in that tiny town clinging the edge of a foothill in the Allegheny mountains. So I started sewing little Christmas ornaments in September adding sequins and glitter and fancy bits of embroidery. As the orgy of gift opening began that Christmas, several relatives held up their admittedly “sincere” looking ornaments and said all the right things.
Later, I found several among the trash being collected to go to the burn barrel out back.
I went back to Cleveland and realized I was the one who was going to have to take down all those decorations and wedge them all back into boxes and closets. I took all that stuff down all right and then I put it out on the tree lawn to be picked up on garbage day. Since then I have never decorated another tree or bought another obligatory gift.
I then learned that we live in a society that won’t willingly allow its members to simply walk away from holidays. Decades later and people are still reacting with astonishment — and…
