(TL;DR? Just scroll down and click on the Spotify link! The xmas music title is not false advertising, promise.)
Christmas and I have not always had an easy relationship. As an atheist Unitarian with one Jewish parent, I have never really been on board for the specific mythology of the holiday, and as a snotty, depressed teenager I wasn’t a big fan of the artificiality and consumerism. (Or so I told myself - in reality I think I was as much trying to manage the weirdly high expectations I still somehow had for the season of cheer.)
In fact, when I was a kid, Hannukah was kind of our big winter family get-together, because my mother’s side of the family had a bunch of cousins with whom to play dreidel and get into mischief. I have very fond memories of the New Jersey Hannukah parties, though looking back at the photos and videos I can see that they were basically just pure chaos with latkes.
Christmas, by comparison, was a quiet holiday celebrated with my father’s parents. It was beautiful and bounteous, to be certain - we got our share of awesome toys, snow and caroling. But I guess the relatively subdued nature of the holiday, combined with the waning of the Hannukah party tradition as we grew older, rendered Christmas susceptible to the charming negativity that I brought to most things I did between ages 13 and 19. Anyone who's known me a while can verify that I could be quite a pill during those years, and at no time was it worse than December (with the possible exception of my birthday, yet another vaguely-defined wintertime celebration filled with unmet and un-meet-able expectations).
In any case, here’s what it took for me to come around on Christmas. 1. Don’t celebrate Christmas one year, and 2. Go to Hawaii. At the same time, if you can swing it. My family spent the last week of December in Hawaii with Jewish relatives about a decade ago now, and it was THE BEST time. We didn’t really do much to celebrate Christmas OR Hannukah that year, because the cousins were all old enough that we didn’t really need to do gifts, and after all Hannukah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish religion. I did insist that we eat out Chinese (well, Thai, as it turned out) on Christmas night because, deliciousness, but other than that we were decidedly non-traditional. We spent Christmas morning body-surfing at Makapu’u beach. Listen: it doesn’t get much better than that.
Since then, the whole holiday season has been a different ball game. Once I could embrace the winter holidays as an adult with all the emphasis on what you do and who you’re with - not what you get, or whose religion means what - things started turning around. And once the holidays really felt like a choice instead of an annual obligation, suddenly they were a choice I wanted to make. It didn’t hurt that my parents followed the Jersey snowbird tradition and invested in some Florida real estate a few years ago in preparation for retirement. Ever since, the holidays have been beach-infused, present-free and pretty darn nice.
Because nothing I do is really important unless it has a soundtrack, my holidays now are also pretty music-filled. And because no soundtrack of mine would be complete without some really beautiful, silly, and f-ing weird stuff on it, my christmas music is AWESOME.
Crank it up.
P.S. I recognize that this whole post just REEKS of privilege: “I used to hate the holidays, but now we go to the beach every year and I love them!” For the record, the only way we could visit Hawaii was because we stayed with our relatives there and used airline miles to fly - and it was still a really expensive trip for the family. My parents are actually underwater on the real estate they purchased in FL just before the real estate bubble burst, and on top of that they spend a good chunk of their free time wrangling a variety of totally insane, occasionally non-paying renters. Everyone’s doing okay, and we’re all incredibly lucky. I truly recognize and appreciate the opportunities I have and how they’ve shaped my thoughts, and I also recognize that nothing is as simple as it may seem.
No comments:
Post a Comment