“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link
by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own
free will I wore it.”
-Charles Dickens, A Christmas
Carol
The guns
were silent across much of the Western front on Christmas day of 1914 when
approximately 100,000 men in the British, Belgian, French and German armies
called a truce for the day. By some accounts it began as Christmas carols
emanated from the opposing trenches, which were often separated by no more than
100 yards, culminating in the two sides singing together. How the truce itself
began and spread along the front is debated, but what we do know is that many
soldiers exchanged gifts of food, cigarettes and other items, and makeshift
soccer balls would be kicked around between the men of enemy nations who’d been
sent out to kill one another. This was to the vexation of the commanders who
feared their troops might recognize how similar they really were to their enemy,
adopt a “live and let live” mentality and lose the will to fight. Though
troubling to the military leaders, these are the very reasons the Christmas
Truce has become immortalized. Even if only for a single day, masses of men
whose job it was to annihilate or be annihilated recognized their brother’s as
such and, in what is the paragon of the spirit of Christmas, made merry and
even had the audacity to enjoy their common company amid the start of a war
which would steal the lives of nearly 10 million soldiers and almost 10 million
civilians.
Symbolic of
how the Christmas season is about emphasizing our likeness as brothers and
sisters and coming together to make peace, the story of the Christmas Truce
begs us to ask, if they can come together and make merry, why can’t we?
Christmas
Spirit morality would, however, be left incomplete without reference to Charles Dickens’
candid and percipient novella A Christmas
Carrol, where the main character Ebenezer Scrooge is the personification of
pure materialistic greed. We the readers are taught the
necessity of viewing one’s own life from a third party perspective, holding up
a mirror so that we can ask whether we really are giving our best (or any) efforts to live a life well loved. Not until he is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past
to watch his younger self putting his greed into action does Scrooge
see how he's affected others and forged the chains of his current loveless existence.
The central
moral to A Christmas Carol is that we
reap what we sow (although there is also socialist appeals throughout). We all aspire to be desired and to be remembered. To love and
be loved adds a certain fullness to life. Our legacy in this temporal world is our only opportunity to live on past our death, and
all decent people want that legacy to be one well remembered. In order to create a future life and legacy we can be proud of, the holiday season encourages us to acknowledge and inspect the chains we may be forging for ourselves.
None of
this, you might have noticed, involves any justification from or grounding in
religion. The holiday celebrations have very unchristian origins as an
alcohol-enhanced Nordic solstice celebration that was co-opted by Christianity (which also presents us with a very questionable “reason for the season”). There
was some revisionist work done by the New Testament authors to place Jesus’ birth in
Bethlehem (to fulfill the Old Testament prophecy) by positing a census which required people to return to their home
towns. The issue with this is that the census describe doesn’t seem to have
taken place. There is no record of it, nor of a Jewish man performing
miracles and being crucified. This is quite a giveaway considering what good record
keepers of such public events the Romans were. Even so, people weren't required to journey to their hometowns for censuses and, if they had, then it wouldn’t have occurred in the winter.
Further,
none of the values we attribute to the Christmas season depend on religion or religious
belief. Has someone ever given a convincing reason why you or I should believe,
on no evidence and against reason, that a man was born via parthenogenesis and was
the son of the creator of the universe (who we also must believe exists)? Or, that
if we do not believe in this man’s existence, forsake this life to follow his
teachings, and give incessant praise for this Dear Leader who knows all of our
actions as well as thoughts, then we will be condemned to torture for all
eternity (such is the boundless mercy of His love)? And why must one believe
such unbelievable and immoral propositions to appeal to the common humanity we
all share, practice self-reflection and spread joy to others? Rejecting these
assumptions, we can easily designate the holiday and its December season to
reminding ourselves to turn our attention inward and meditate on the love we
have and whether our actions are increasing or decreasing the deserved
happiness of those around us. The holiday has fortunately become something
secular, though has unfortunately also become a consumerist, shallow time of
year with much though not all of the gift-giving being more akin to an
obligation to spend lots of money than a time to express appreciation through
more meaningful gestures.
I was lucky enough myself to never be indoctrinated with the trappings of Christianity, so this holiday, full of joy as it is, is entirely secular for myself. Religious
though my father was (and that my mother’s family is), Christmas never was a
religious event for me growing up. On Christmas Eve my parents, brother and I would tune into TBS for the 24 hour marathon of A Christmas Story while drinking hot cocoa. During
Christmas dinner with our relatives, the closest we come to a prayer is the
lighthearted reference to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where we all say “grace” (“The Blessing!”)
instead of anything recognizable as an actual prayer. Despite a family who is
modestly religious, Christmas never involved any recognition, praise of, or
giving of thanks for the alleged birth of Jesus. In fact, the only aspect of my
Christmases that is recognizably religious is the tradition I began in high
school of attending Christmas Eve mass with my best friend and his family. (I
first went before I realized I was an atheist, and liked the church because on
my first visit they told a non-religious parable which emphasized the moral of
happiness being a choice - a result of one’s mindset and chosen response to
circumstances.)
Never having
had religion placed at the center of the holiday season, it becomes apparent
how I so easily dispel it from the whole Christmas enterprise. It simply isn't necessary.
Holiday's cause us to get along for a day by emphasizing our similarities and putting aside all of our minor differences, whether of different
ethnicity, language, class, or what have you. I tell you the truth,
we want to spread comfort and joy and we feel and intrinsic satisfaction at being
the cause of this feeling in others. The experiences these actions evoke in ourselves and others are reason enough to embrace the urge to act upon them. As for popular traditions, I enjoy the movies, the cookies, the shopping mall Santas, the Christmas lights, and I enjoy giving thoughtful gifts and reminding the people I care about that they never go unappreciated. I use the season as a time to reflect on myself and how I am imacting the lives of everyone around me. This is how I approach Christmas
as a nonbeliever, and why I continue to celebrate it every December.
Happy Christmas, friends.
Happy Christmas, friends.
