What You Can Take From Christmas; Even If You Don't Believe In It

It is often said that the Christmas season is the most stressful time of the year in North American culture. In fact, many people believe that suicide rates even go up around Christmas. This is rather odd for a season embraced by a holiday that celebrates Life, Love, Giving, and Cheer as opposed to ( for example) a holiday like Holloween which glorifies darkness, fear, evil, in modern times lack of responsibility, and death itself. Yet somehow people feel worse watching stories of a loving savior or magical gift giver than ones of people getting haunted or butchered by monsters and ghouls; human sacrifice included. Granted, that's not all of Holloween and for most its just a time to party or go trick or treating; but for just as many people Christmas is just a time to get together as family and give presents to each other so tit for tat.

To start this discussion the statistic is actually false. Suicide rates in fact do NOT increase during Christmas. But most people (especially those who work in retail) attest to the fact that people get grumpier around the holiday. So it begs the question as to why people are so stressed and grumpy around a holiday like Christmas? Well, a lot of it has to do with our expectations and perceptions. A great deal of our stress derives from our ability or inability to please other people or garner people's approval. When you have a holiday that has run wild on the idea of giving material gifts as a symbol for caring about someone all of a sudden everyone has to give one or get one and if you don't then obviously you don't care about someone. So what we have is not a holiday about giving, but instead a holiday about getting and somehow finding out who really likes you and how much. Make sense?

No it doesn't. But think about it for a moment. For just about everyone the dots are easy to follow. It's easy to stress out and worry when you have friends and family judging you for not giving them the right thing for Christmas or using material gifts as a measure for your value to others. Especially if money is tight as people struggle to meet these high expectations. Mundane decisions become life or death as seemingly whole relationships and our self-worth depend on them. Whose house do we visit on Christmas Day? Whose invited us or sent us a card? Did we remember everyone? Where do we spend Christmas Eve? Why can't I get time off to visit my family? How can we visit all family members in just one day?

But despite what many people think, the key to having a happy stress free Christmas is not, in fact, found in realizing something deep inside you. Regardless of your own feelings and worries about your efforts to meet expectations, YOU, yes you, still affect everyone else's Christmas by your own actions. While you may be fretting about how to get everything right and worrying about who cares about you or getting as much as the next guy, you yourself could be causing the issue by forcing expectations and perceptions on your own friends or relatives. In essence, you have the power to give peace and cheer or stress and misery.

And this is where I believe the cultural narrative gets Christmas wrong. So many times our cultural message and Christmas stories are about someone "finding" some sort of inner peace, typically by coming to terms with an inability to meet all these expectations (in the worst ones by sending the message that only your feelings as an individual matter) and just being thankful for what they have and their family and friends. There's just one problem with that...there's already a holiday for celebrating all we are thankful for and its called Thanksgiving! You know, the one pop-culture skips. The modern Christmas/Holiday narrative misses the whole meaning of Christmas entirely because it can't seem to realize the significance of Christmas is not in getting something, but looking outside yourself and to others.

Christmas is NOT about inner peace, at least not directly. It's about learning the power of selflessness, devotion, grace, and love. Selflessness by sacrificing time, money, and effort for others to make them happy and bless them; devotion by choosing to invest in someone regardless of how they have hurt you or done something that you disagreed with; grace by forgiving someone their offenses against you so you can atone with one another; and love by watching the impact of making loving decisions, decisions focused on others, and how they inevitably edify and build up everyone...yourself in the process. In an indirect way acting in love and selflessness will bring you inner peace because people are designed to love; even you. Love, living and acting outward focused, is having spiritual character in sync with the very spirit of the universe itself and that should feel good. So in effect, you have to truly give selflessly to really "get" anything out of Christmas.

That is the power of the Christmas story. You don't have to be someone who believes in it to get this message but take the Nativity story as it is the very story that inspired the actual holiday. Here's the historical backdrop; God saves the Israelites from destruction, delivers them from slavery, fights for them in getting them a home, rescues them from devastation time and time again even though they disregard him and turn away from him again and again. Kind of like having the the most ill-behaved and disrespectful child you could ever have. They have been taken to some hefty extremes and at times when they threw God off they suffered the consequences of not being protected by him...but only for a little bit. God would always come back and try to reconcile, over and over again because he could not leave them.

Flash forward to about 4BC. You have a people that cant even hear God anymore. They have substituted him for a code of written laws created by their own wise-men who "know better" and tell the people what God "really" meant. They are looking for a king, not a savior. Worldly power, not salvation; revenge against their enemies, not peace. (Sound familiar?) But despite all of that God goes through with his key plan to save them and give them a way to atone with Him even if they don't want it. He sends the Incarnation, Jesus, in a humble and unassuming way so no one can ever say God was lofty and coerced or coaxed anyone to reconcile with him through force or riches. He comes giving as a peasant, not demanding glory like an elitist. He shows up to do the right thing, yet again.

Forgiving, full of grace, loving in every intent, and fully devoted to humanity, he comes to take on the burden of their sin. Now, even if you don't believe in the redemption message, you can get the point. The point is that no matter what we have been through or what we have against one another, we can reconcile and have the fortitude to act in love no matter what has been done to us. That is the true power to change the world for the better, to offer grace in turmoil, offer love while being hated, and blessings while being persecuted. Which is why I love the symbolism created by Christmas in winter. In the same way you are psychologically compelled to keep moving and living in an environment that is cold and dead, so you are challenged by God to give and spread life in a world that is decaying and dying.

In doing this we offer each other a REAL gift. Not clothes, a new gadget, a new toy, or a trip to the spa; what we can give are acts of the spirit of God, the very breath (ruoch) of life/love. You give understanding, compassion, joy, and yes a new toy or a basket of food may be the vessel for that gift but in the very act of giving you act in the same way God did when He sent His Son. That is the moment of "peace on earth and goodwill toward men" (term has always been gender inclusive of course). Both parties experience it and both parties are meant to.

In a very real sense this "peace" is contagious. Much like people experiencing a "pay it forward" scenario are compelled to give that gift to someone else, you also are compelled to give. Having realized that you have received a gift that you did not earn, you are now free to give and focus your attention outward. Granted you may choose not to, but that very decision to go ahead and give is the very spark of the divine that was given to you at creation. THAT is Christmas. And that is what I encourage you to do this holiday season. Rather than expecting this magical Hollywood hoopla to "happen" to you, make it happen for someone else and in doing so you will find that is the only real way it was going to happen at all.