Kissing Under the Mistletoe Mindtrap

One of the annoying things about being a parent is how we willingly clump ourselves into a generational herd, mooing and lowing our approval of the same products and huffing our disapproval, mostly under our breaths and in whispered tones, at those who choose to ignore the collective wisdom and do things their own way. I sometimes find myself falling into this mind trap, at least metaphorically clucking my tongue at the fits and foibles of a fellow mom or dad, and listening with eagerness at every tip of advice, from parenting techniques to product reviews. I’m also pretty sure that my own parenting techniques have been at the butt end of some of these collective guffaws, as I have shown absolutely no interest in doing some of the things that are expected these days from any right-thinking parent, like blending my own organic baby food (a practice that seems to have become almost de rigueur in some circles). Also, our 3-year old son’s bedtime is somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, and I’m sure this is probably considered negligent, or at the least a little bit loopy, by many parents (although I prefer to think that we are simply operating on Brazilian time).

A lot of this parental group-think is probably a necessary survival technique, particularly for first-time parents, as we seek to glean a few tips on how to navigate the shoals of bringing another soul into this world. But then I’ll look up from my position in the herd and see that we’ve all moseyed onto the same patch of rocky ground, seemingly for no other reason than the folks around us were doing the same thing. And I rarely feel more like this than during the Christmas season, which is a collective mind-fuck to begin with.

When I started hearing some of my fellow parents talk about “elf on a shelf,” my initial bovine instinct was one of fear that I was about to be left behind by the herd. I felt a brief pang of guilt that here was some crucial component of contemporary childhood that I had been denying my son, followed by the equally urgent instinct to wonder: “Where can I get one of those things?” Then I actually found out what an “elf on a shelf” was, and how much one cost (beginning somewhere well north of $20, at least if my sources are correct), and I began to wonder why I actually needed to shell out that kind of cash for a glorified doll. And when I began listening to how parents were moving this overpriced doll around their house and having it “follow” their children, under the guise that the elf was going to be “reporting to Santa,” I began to get a little creeped out. Maybe Elf on a Shelf is one of those mass neuroses, like Rolfing, or key parties, whose dysfunction only becomes clear in retrospect.

So I have put “Elf on a Shelf” in the same place where “Go the Fuck to Sleep” resides, as a cultural phenomena of my generation of parents that I have chosen to ignore. Nothing personal, but I just don’t get why we as a culture have all of a sudden gotten incredulous, bordering on apoplectic, that our children don’t just want to run off and hop into bed when it would be most convenient for us. Nor do I get why I’d want to try and convince my child that a stuffed elf was watching him, and that he better be “good” if he wants any Christmas presents. Sorry, but I’m not playing this game. Especially with $30 as the price of entry.

That being said, I love Christmas. I love the family element. I love the Christian ritual. I love the echoes of a pagan bacchanalia. It’s all good to me, with the possible exception of the crooning post-war treacle and the Santa kitsch. And here’s why:

Nordic Midwinter Fest: At its base, Christmas is a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, looking forward to longer days and the warming of the sun. A lot of Christmas imagery combines the sacred and the pagan, and some, for instance the Christmas tree, are more pagan than not. The evergreen tree is brought in to the home as a promise of nature’s renewal. Sure, it also alludes to Christ’s own promise of eternal life, but at its essence, the Christmas tree is gussified nature worship, with the lit decorations an echo of the stars outside and of the returning sun. It is a symbol that echoes back to some midwinter orgy after everyone had drunk a yard of mead. The midwinter drinking fest is a grand legacy of the Northern European tribes, a 3,000-year tradition that invites family, friends and guests to an extended toast around the fire, creating the kind of bonds that served these people well when they’d hop in a boat the following spring and go pillage the country next door.

Christian Ritual: If the Christmas tree is actually pagan, the nativity scene and the Advent calendar remain predominantly Christian symbols (although even here a lot of the imagery is a bundled mess). And a lot of the grand old hymns come right out of the traditional Christian liturgy. I think I’d love many of these songs even if I were not a man of faith. Emotionally, many are a mix of triumph and foreboding, of grandeur combined with simple joy. “Fall on your knees and hear the angels rejoicing, O night, O holy night, When Christ was born,” the song soars, its joy leavened by a fear of the weight of the moment. Like the three wise men, we are all, regardless of ideology or creed, welcome to rejoice in Christ’s birth which, like the birth of each and every child, holds all the promise of human possibility, a divinity that, at least on this day, is reflected in the pagan bonfire as surely as those of the Sacraments.

Hearth and Family: Most of these traditions are really a more recent addition to the more ancient rituals of both the pagan and the Christian church. Many date back less than 200 years. Even such a seemingly venerable tradition as Santa coming down the chimney was just a gimmick created in the 19th Century, the co-option of older symbols in an attempt to make the home seem like where it’s at, an only partly successful effort to lure men back to their families, rather than having them go out on Christmas night and “wassailing” with their buds. This appeal of the hearth remains at the heart of the contemporary American Christmas. Christmas is an invitation into the joys of domesticity, where we can look around at the home and the family we have created and see that it is all good.

Fun and Kitsch: I guess I have the biggest problem with this fourth lure of the contemporary American Christmas. I’m just not into the ostentatious display of goods. I’m not into breathy middle aged men, generally sounding like they are at least two martinis to the wind, warbling about presents, and city lights, and snow. I’m not into music being sung with your jazz hands out. But I like Christmas parties in spite of all that. I like downing a few drinks and hanging out with the boss’ wife, or one of the secretaries, and listening to them complain about some authority figure or how excited they were to see “Million Dollar Quartet.”

These joys, from the transcendent to the transitory, from the passionate to the mundane, are why I eagerly dive each year into these holiday rituals, as full as they are of ideological contradiction, societal expectations, and collective group-think. I do it, in short, because these rituals are both beautiful and true, and they enrich my life.