Depressed Christmas 2014

So I am pretty depressed this Christmas. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I think it is because I believed in a Jesus centered Christmas for so many years. I'm sort of out of practice in finding meaning from secular Christmas. I think it's possible. I think it's possible to find a lot of light and love in the secular celebration of Christmas. But the problem is, like I said, I'm out of practice. It's not that one is better than the other, but when you've spent 20 years celebrating Christmas in the Christian way, like really Christian, it all starts to feel pretty stupid without that. It seems fake. I guess it seems childlike. Which is fine except I have been celebrating Christmas for me all these years. Chris's was a big spiritual celebration for me -- not for the kids-- it was for me. And now that side of it is kind of dead. I want to be able to create a new Christmas. I want a Christmas with new traditions, new representations of light and of winter solstice and of peace. I want a new Christmas that is about love and family and finding joy in the depressing short winter days and finding light at the end of the tunnel. A Christmas about Giving getting loving caring. Maybe I will get there. But for now it all just feels really dead.

Last year at Christmas time when we had just left the church, I felt exhilarated by Christmas. I felt free to celebrate each and every tradition. I felt open and excited. I still felt safe celebrating Jesus's birth, and I felt the hope of all the rest of the world's truth. I celebrated everything. I celebrated with joy and with cookies.

The Jesus story is really powerful. It's really beautiful. It can also be really ugly. But for Christmas, at least, it's really beautiful. The music is beautiful. The images are beautiful. The idea of a light coming to save the world and bring the peace and joy that everyone is looking for. The idea that one baby was born for you, to make you clean and to love you. That's beautiful? Right? I spent two decades feeling that Christmas was a celebration of a real person who came and did a real thing. And whether the story is true or not, I believe in my life that I've been wrong about many things regarding church and Christ. So for now, I don't choose to worship this story or even care about it for now. At this point in my life I know there are beautiful things in the universe. light and love. Things that heal. Things that are reborn. Things that help us grow. Essences that create redemption. But I'm not sure I can celebrate those things at Christmas anymore.

So where does that leave me? Well, for one, I can't really sing those songs anymore without carrying a little bit of baggage with me. Maybe someone who has never fully bought into Christianity can still celebrate the things that are beautiful about Christmas and the beauty in the music. It's like when people say, "When I hear that song, I just think about how much love there is in the world." When really the song is saying Jesus is real and if you don't believe in him, you go to hell. End of discussion. Someone who never fully believed that is not really hearing those same words in the song. They're just going about their business. They are just singing. They're just feeling the love and the joy in the moment. They're not feeling jaded by mistrust, lies, or manipulation. They're not decorating the tree concerned that their children will actually believe that the message from the song playing in the background is true -- and that belief will, of course, screw them up.

My less churchy family members love Christmas. They love Santa and elves. They make everything magical and beautiful. They don't seem to be worried about traumatizing anybody with lies of Santa. They don't have to worry that lying about Santa makes Jesus not true someday. They don't have to worry about outshining Jesus with other Christmas myths and traditions. And they don't have to worry about losing their faith and losing their Christmas. They might be missing some of the deep spiritual and metaphorical principles that are hidden within Christmas that you learn through years of deep study in Christianity, but they're happy. And they get to keep it. I'm jealous now. I probably judged them before. I probably judged them for being to shallow and for not giving their children a great spiritual, metaphysical experience. But now I'm just jealous. They get to keep their Christmas.

Mostly my Christmas is dead because like I said, I am out of practice finding meaning all on my own. There was comfort in letting a church tell me everything that was meaningful and why it was meaningful. It was not enough to say "this is special because family is special." It was always "families are forever and so this is crucial." It was never enough to say "I feel good right now. this is nice." It was always, "this is the spirit. This is testifying of truth. If it's true, then you have to do all these other things. Don't lose the spirit. Don't lose your truth." It was intense. But I like intense. I'm lonely and empty now with intense. I was never very good at finding meaning on my own. And now I'm out of practice which is a double whammy. I went to church growing up. And it was never enough for me. I went to classes once a week, and I tried to get the teachers to draw more conclusions, and make more connections. I wanted more absolute truth. So when I found these truths in another church, I grabbed hold for dear life.

So Christmas, like several other things in my life since I left the church, makes me feel about 12 years old. I feel a little bit stuck where I was before I found the church. Sure, I am older and wiser, but that might be why this is so depressing. I can see my regression. I feel naked. I can see my weaknesses and my strengths, and I have to manage them all on my own. Sometimes I wish I had those two decades of practicing Christmas back so I could do it differently. Two decades of practicing life, doing it differently. But that's not really fair to the church or to me. Those 20 years also changed me in many ways that won't change back. Those 20 years of Mormonism and Christianity guided me during vulnerable years. They made me a scholar. They made me a poet. They made me a thoughtful and careful seeker. They taught me to truly understand and believe in change and growth and rebirth and redemption. I'll keep those things. And maybe in time my Christmas will finally change and grow and then be reborn.



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