If you celebrate Christmas, you know someone who attempts to create the
quintessential holiday experience, a Dickens happening every Dec. 25.
Maybe it's you.
Christmas is a single day on the calendar, but for many, it is a two-month
season filled to excess with decorations galore, too many gifts and tables
piled high with food.
That Christmas zealot is me. I want to give my family what Charles Dickens
said of an enlightened Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of "A Christmas Carol:"
"He knew how to keep Christmas well."
I am a recovering holidayholic.
Hollywood classics such as "White Christmas" are my undoing. The December
issues of Taste of Home and Good Housekeeping, combined with a craft-store
walkthrough, trigger a compulsion.
When the Budweiser Christmas Clydesdales jingled across our television
screen, I bust out the evergreen boughs, bows, balls, glitter and candles.
If I spot a clever holiday invitation while shopping, my brain incubates the
next grand affair.
Homemaking, craft and cooking muscles burst forth. The freezer fills with
tasty nibbles, and the house resembles a holiday movie set.
One year, I threw a "Just Desserts" soiree, featuring every powdered,
sprinkled, candied, frosted and glazed concoction imaginable. My guests
craved ordinary eats and black coffee when they left.
As a homemaker in a feminist world, it seems necessary to justify my
privileged status with Christmas extravaganzas. My goal is optimum Christmas
memories – presents all 'round, joy, smiles and happiness.
Over the years, most Christmas photos of Ellen were taken at the sink.
Styles changed, but not mine. I am forever pictured in an apron and rubber
gloves. Too busy to be at my own party, I entertained everybody but me.
Did I remember to put out the creche?
Our pastor's homilies on the "Holi-daze" go deafly by. The Christ of
Christmas is in my heart but not in my actions. When New Year's ends, I have
missed Christmas but set a fine table. Did everybody have a good time?
Exhaustion and spiritual dehydration are self-inflicted.
"We call this the 'silly season.' It's my busiest time of the year," says
Atlanta psychiatrist Dr. Dave Davis. "There is too much drinking and eating.
People try to give just the right present and make everybody happy."
Support groups for single parents, eating disorders, drugs and alcohol --
along with credit counselors and psychiatrists – experience heavy traffic
after the holidays. Christmas is a paradox: A holy moment eclipsed by
extremes.
"Holidays can be a wonderful time," adds Suzanne Simons, executive director
of the National Headache Foundation, but, "more demands on less time, family
settings where we get on each other's nerves, changing time zones, odd
sleep/wake cycles, unusual diet and alcohol, airline travel/altitude and
false expectations" can fashion an un-Merry Christmas.
Average Americans spend four to six months paying off their holiday debt,
much of it from impulse buying, according to former Certified Financial
Planner Gary Foreman, editor of "The Dollar Stretcher," a thrift newsletter
and website.
"A lot of people have no idea how much they're spending," Foreman says.
"Christmas shouldn't have financial hangovers that last until spring."
How did we get here?
"Jesus probably wouldn't have celebrated His birthday," an old preacher
told me when commenting on my Christmas excess. "But Easter, the
resurrection, now that's something to celebrate."
The first Christmas was simplicity itself, an infant king nestled in a
feeding trough. A few shepherds showed up, illuminated by the angelic choir,
and later the Magi with three well-chosen gifts.
For most of the 1st century world, Christmas was a non-event, much less a
feast of the senses.
This year, the catastrophic events of Sept. 11 birthed in me recognition
that my Christmas Maximus is folly. Faith, friends and family are simple
gifts, but plenty. And through them, God will bless us, every one.
Merry Christmas.