Ahhh! The Holidays Are Over!
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham
January 7, 2007
Ahhh! It’s time to take a deep breath and congratulate each other that we survived the holidays again. Thank heavens they’re finally over. Oh, not that there weren’t wonderful times there. Our Christmas Eve service was a marvel, and it was so delightful to see the pews and balconies so full – and what singing! And the brass! Passersby were quite impressed to hear the joyful noise we made. That was definitely one of my favorite parts of the holidays.
What I’m thinking about more are all of the expectations that come with the holidays, the need to satisfy so many people with so many different demands on us to behave or perform in ways they expect. The need to figure out what to give people; or the delicate negotiations about not interchanging gifts with some people while making sure that no one’s feelings are hurt; or the delicate moment when a child gets what you believe is the perfect gift and doesn’t seem to realize how perfect it is, or perhaps seems to be faking enthusiasm; or that dreaded moment when a child of a certain age looks up from a towering pile of gifts and says “Is that all?” Or perhaps it’s coordinating the cooking for a family get-together of 15 or 20 or 25 or more, making sure that everything comes out at the right time, that everyone likes at least something about the meal. Then, of course, there are the emotional minefields most families deal with around the holidays: the uncle who loves political arguments; the parent who has strong ideas about how you should be raising your kids and isn’t afraid to mention them to your kids; the children who have strong ideas about how you should live or what you should believe and aren’t afraid to mention them to pretty much everyone; the missing relative whom you’d prefer not to talk about, or the present relative who does nothing but talk. If you’ve experienced some stress over the last month and a half of “the holidays,” know that you are not alone. I suppose each of us has had some of these symptoms at one point or another recently.
There are almost informal job requirements for the season: host, guest, gift-buyer, pleased recipient, and so on. Perhaps you’ve had some formal or informal performance reviews during the holidays, or maybe you’ve given yourself one after a particularly long day: Good spirits, check; Wholesome food, check; Controlled appetite for too-rich deserts; hmmm; Related well to peers, check; Related well to family members, well….
Who invented this train of holidays from Thanksgiving through New Years, anyway? Norman Rockwell? Hallmark Cards? Department Stores? Churches? All of the above, of course, and beside that we all inherit expectations – often contradictory – about what we ought to be saying and doing during the holiday season.
Normally, this period of winter after New Years would be a time to crawl into hibernation, or go skiing quite a ways away from here, or to take a long pause in the middle of a lovely snowstorm in which no one would expect you to be out and around. But in this weather, it feels weirdly like it’s time for spring planting, not for taking a well-deserved break. Someone at the transfer station yesterday asked me if it was too early to start complaining about the heat. Eastern Canada has been without snow so much that their resort villages are closing down. In New York City, the cherry trees are blooming in the Botanical Gardens. We here are snow-less in this place where snow seems a natural part of the winter landscape. We wonder, could this mean something disturbing? Is this a normal variance or something more? We feel uneasiness just when we should be allowed to feel our worries are over for the moment.
Maybe I exaggerate a little. Perhaps the holiday season has been pure pleasure for you; perhaps you’ve felt no pressure or stress, and haven’t overindulged at all. If so, congratulations! May we all be so fortunate in the future. For most of us, though, I suspect that that holidays are a mixed blessing; that there were some golden moments we wish could have lasted forever, and there were some distressing moments we wish could have stopped before they started. I wanted to comment on three spiritual aspects of the season of ambivalence we have just passed through.
First, many of us are prone to holiday and post-holiday depression. If we don’t have families, if we’re lonely, or if our families aren’t a place we can feel at home, we may compare some idealized view of what the holidays ought to be like with our actual experiences and feel as though we are somehow to blame for the discrepancy between ideal and reality. One of the problems of the season is the idealization of possibilities with the resultant let-down when things don’t go as we wished they might. The disappointment may well have some truth behind it, but it’s important to do some reality testing of our expectations and the expectations laid on us. At no other time of year is the bar set so high for us; we need to bear in mind that perfection is beyond our range as human beings, at the holidays as at every other time of year.
Jane Rzepka, whom many of you heard speak at our Ordination and Installation service last October, offers these reflections on the season:
Newsletters from other churches arrive in the mail every day. So I read them, and they get me to thinking. For example:
Ministers' columns at this time of the year say one of two things: "The holiday season is a happy time," or "The holidays are depressing." The "happy time" school of thought makes a case for generosity, good cheer, and a deepening spirituality, whereas the "depression" advocates cite studies that prove the winter holidays are difficult. At the moment, the "happy holidays" group has a slight edge, the freshest crop of Ph.D.s having studied our December moods and found them to be merry after all.
I beg to differ. With no empirical work at all to back me up, I'd like to make a case for people being regular people even when December rolls around. Sure, Mom is frantic after Thanksgiving, but she is a frantic person in general. Brother John is nonchalant about the holidays, but he's always been the laid-back type. Aunt Martha gears up for a family squabble, but remember, she set up a round or two in July. Uncle John is a natural Santa, but he's a sweetie all year long.
In our family, we will incessantly exclaim, "Where's your Christmas spirit?" from Thanksgiving until the twenty-fifth. This phrase, at our house, has always been an obnoxious code for "Lighten up, it's Christmastime, act merry, not human."
I'm changing the code. This year "Christmas
spirit" will refer to the fact that we are who we are, merry or depressed,
and we love each other anyway.[1]
Second, I’d like to reflect about giving and receiving help and care, especially in light of the holiday season. This is the time of year when extended families get together to celebrate and, perhaps incidentally or perhaps intentionally, assess the state of each other’s health. In my case, Deedee, David, Sean & I flew out to visit my family in Madison, Wisconsin, to celebrate my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. To be candid, we had to exert a little extra pressure on the boys to convince them to go, especially since the celebration included attending my parents’ church and returning to the East Coast just about midnight on New Year’s Eve. One element of urgency I felt in persuading them that going was important was the frail state of my father’s health. He’s 84 and my mother is 82 and he had a rough winter last year, in and out of the hospital several times. I was aware that this might be the boys’ last chance to see their grandfather in decent health or indeed at all, given that they’re both out on their own now. That reality of mortality was a kind of undercurrent of the celebration, as all of us were aware of the pride my father felt in being the first in his family to be part of a couple which had lived long enough to celebrate their 60th anniversary coupled with the uneasy realization that he might not live a long time past that highlight of his life. Indeed, my brother and I joked a little about the fact that we were celebrating a little early, since their actual anniversary falls at the end of February; we figured Dad wanted to make sure he was well enough to enjoy the occasion.
I suspect I’m not alone in this company in having parents who are of a certain age at which these concerns begin to come to the fore, or perhaps in having children who are having similar thoughts about you. Like the earth, our lives have seasons, and part of the task of aging is to learn how to accept the diminishment of our powers as age prevents us from doing all the things we used to be able to do, and eventually from caring for ourselves as independently as we would wish. Our family is fortunate so far in that Mom is in excellent health and quite able to care for Dad at least for the moment. It is very likely, though, that at some point one or the other of them will be unable to care for themselves. We’ve discussed some of these issues in our family and I hope when the time comes they will be able to accept the need to receive the kind of help and comfort they themselves have been faithful to give others all these years.
Age can be a time of great joy when the wisdom that age brings is honored and when spiritual growth becomes a key focus of attention. As our bodies decline, our spirits can take flight. Proverbs says [20:29] “The glory of youths is their strength, but the beauty of the aged is their gray hair.” This is the time of life for basking in the glow of those who come after us, of gaining great pleasure from the young. Again, Proverbs says [17: 6] “Grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of children is their parents.”
The Confucian tradition has in some ways done a better job than our Western traditions in recognizing the appropriate roles and responsibilities for different times of our lives. But it is never easy to acknowledge that our strength is failing or to accept help even when we truly need it. One of my hopes for this congregation is that we will be able to help each other in transitions like this and be willing to accept help and wisdom when needs arise. Building a Beloved Community means reaching out to offer help, but it also means accepting help when help is needed. It’s true that Jesus said “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” but if there were no one to receive, how could any of us give? I’m reminded of the story of a man of deep faith caught in a dreadful hurricane. He crawls out on his roof as the waters are rising around him, calling on the Lord to rescue him. A canoe comes by and offers to pick him up but he refuses, because he is so confident that the Lord will come to his aid. The water rises another two feet and forces him to the very peak of the roof and a rowboat comes by, calling out to him to come at once, but again he refuses. Finally, he’s standing on the very top of his chimney when a helicopter flies over and drops a ladder, but he turns it away, still calling on the Lord for a miracle. He loses his footing a few minutes later, drowns and enters the pearly gates. When he gets into the presence of the Lord, he says “Lord, I was counting in you to save me. Where were you?” The Lord replies, “I sent that canoe; I even sent a ladder from heaven, dangling from a helicopter. What were you waiting for, a thunderbolt?” Let’s be willing to accept help as well as give it.
Finally, I wanted to reflect for a minute or two about negotiating religion within our families. The holidays are a time when different religious choices can come into high relief. I mentioned before that part of our celebration of my parents’ wedding anniversary included attendance with all their descendants at the Pentecostal church where I grew up and where my father has been a member since he was 10 years old. I haven’t gone with them in quite a while, since we usually attend that local Unitarian Universalist church when we visit them. This time, though, it was essential to the celebration that all nineteen of us stand up and take a bow while the congregation applauded. That was the easy part. The hard part was standing almost the entire service while the congregation sang praise songs over and over led by a rock band and featuring words that were too theologically challenging for me to even try to sing.
Perhaps your experiences over the holidays were a little less trying, but maybe there was a relative who wanted to enlighten you to the real meaning of the season or challenged you to defend your own beliefs or perhaps suggested that an unfortunate fate awaited you unless you got your theology straight. That’s why I’m a Unitarian Universalist; we don’t have to make the claim that someone else is wrong, damned to hell, or thinking incorrectly. We can listen, consider, and learn from any insights they may have to offer. As Edwin Markham put it: “He drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle that took him in.” Rather than denounce, we can include. That’s an important part of our Universalist heritage, the claim that God’s grace is for everyone, not just for the chosen few who believe as I do or who had the good fortune to be born in a particular country or religion. Part of our life’s journey is to re-appropriate the faith of our childhood in new ways which suit the realities of our maturity. That can be a painful process, but it is best done when we cultivate an acceptance of difference and ambiguity while maintaining our own spiritual and moral integrity.
Maybe I was a little hasty in bemoaning the holiday season. The ancient Jewish festivals – Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah – provided an opportunity to pause in time and remember the timeless – miracles of creation and salvation. In the same way, our own festivals, derived in part from those more ancient ones, provide us with opportunities for giving thanks, for renewing hope, for celebrating what passes away and what comes anew. The more we celebrate these festivals as people of faith with other people of faith, the more we tap their ancient power to renew us and set us on a right path. Rather than trying to live up to expectations, perhaps the way to experience the holidays best is to live down to possibilities, to become, as Jesus put it, like little children in their joy and openness to what is new.
This season of quiet after the festivals are all over provide us with a time to integrate, to contemplate, to renew, to turn inward; a time for meditation, for finding new opportunities in our lives just starting to show their possibilities.
Maybe the holidays are worth it after all! May all of our after-holiday times be as blessed as we hoped in our fondest wishes that the holidays would be.
Amen
[1] Jane Ranney Rzepka, “The Christmas Spirit,” in Listening for Our Song: Collected Meditations, Volume Four, Margaret L. Beard, Ed., Boston: Skinner House, 2002, pp. 78-79.