In Defense of All Things Christmas Kitsch

Nativities made of fresh meat or Batman and T-Rex . . . blow-up snow globes adorning front yards . . Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer blaring from every loudspeaker . . . every Lifetime and Hallmark schmaltzy Christmas movie ever made (who knew It’s a Wonderful Life would spawn its own cottage industry?) . . . A Christmas Story being about a boy’s yearning for a BB gun rather than the birth of our Savior . . .

Yes, I confess, I love it all.

Every bit of it – all of it, the ridiculous extremity of it makes me positively giddy.  It’s like – well, it’s like the best birthday party – ever.

Of course, I’m the one who picked the picture of the Easter Bunny posing like a Playboy centerfold atop our church sign (What will you do with the risen one?) for the church’s FB banner.

My Christmas childhood memories are all good ones.  Maybe that’s part of it.  My dad, no Christian, nevertheless rejoiced in all the celebration.  We made candy together.  We strung tinsel icicles one by one (the only proper way) on the tree.  We made our way to Grandma’s house.

And there were always presents.  Mom says there weren’t many, but in my memories, presents flowed like a river towards me – maybe it’s the love I’m remembering – the best present of all.

I love that certain men and boys in my life ask for underwear for Christmas and are delighted when they get them.  I love sending and receiving cards of sentimentality in the mail.  I love all the decorations of yards and homes, even when a North American Santa is at the manger (and maybe especially then).  I love the contrast of the busy craziness with the quiet spaces of wonder.  I love the sentimentality.

When I think on my own son’s birthday, I get all teary and sentimental.  Why not when thinking on the birth of Jesus the Christ?

Most of all, I love that it is not possible for there to even be a hint of policing about this celebration – you cannot mandate joy or laughter.  They either happen or they don’t.

So to all my friends with shorts in the proverbial twist over Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays, etc., etc., etc., can’t we lighten up just a little, just this once?

After all, it is a party.

Broken Packages

Jeanne Lou gave me what she and the girls could retrieve from my mom’s crushed car a few days back, but it wasn’t until last night that I actually inventoried what was left of Mom’s abortive over-the-river-and-through-the-woods journey to my house that ended in her wreck coming down the Virginia-facing side of Cheat Mountain.

The Christmas presents, so carefully wrapped, presented with torn paper, crushed boxes, and those blasted containers I can never open without serious self-injury now not so smug.  It all looks like the after-Christmas-morning melee – how did I never see our Christmas morning flotsam for the wreckage it is?

As I survey it all, various me’s emerge:

Clinically-detached me wonders at the science of impact on a cold winter’s day, where so much survived intact, but the plastic bits are all shattered.  What is it about the properties of plastic that metal and rubber and even glass could remain unbroken, but not the plastic?  This is what I think as I survey a small yellow funnel Mom had for adding oil, now in bits – and other plastic things as well.

Theologian me surveys it all and wants to draw some meaningful metaphor out of the things that survived and those that did not – surely some important insight about our own brokenness is called for, what with the tattered paper and cracks so visible.

But it is daughter me who prevails as I solemnly open each gift bearing my own name, as always bemused by some gifts and touched by others – observing how Mom’s skin is now as delicate as wrapping paper – and just as torn by the indignities of being hurled about a moving missile of a car on the skids in the snow mountains of West Virginia. . . how her broken bones must look like the shattered bits of the new steam iron she was bringing me, still in its box. . . and as I sit alone in Mom’s house in the darkness of the night, with only the sound of her ticking kitchen clock, within the vagaries of my own soul, I weep.