The True Meaning of Christmas?

What’s Christmas all about?  Honestly, I have no idea.

I grew up half-Jewish with non-observant parents, and my Christian relatives were on the other side of the continent.  The holiday’s half a mystery to me.

My parents were rebellious and hated the commercialism.  They made some effort, but not much.  We had a few Christmas trees along the way.  There was this sickly aluminum thing.  You wouldn’t think an aluminum tree could be sickly and shed, but somehow this one did.  My mother can endure nothing that sheds, so she tossed it and we got an actual pine tree.  Turned out my kid sister was allergic.  That was the end of Christmas trees.

I haven’t decorated one since I was about 10.  Can’t say that I miss it.  Got drunk and absolutely demolished one when I was about 23.  That was fun.  Stomped the shit out of it, then dragged it outside and beat a car with it.  A ’75 Plymouth Valiant, cream with a beige interior.  Couldn’t hurt that car.

School was closed.  That was good.  Christmas meant that, I guess.

As I got older, I noticed the stores were closed too.  Christmas meant the day when all the stores are closed.  Except the Chinese restaurant and the movie theater.  The Chinese were like the Jews.  They didn’t really know what the fuck was going on.  And the movie theater owners?  You got me there.  I even worked at a movie theater for a few years in college, but I could never figure out why they opened for Christmas.

Either way, it was a thing for Jews.  Not that Chinese and a movie is all that, especially if the movie sucks.  But when it’s the only thing?  Yeah, sure, that works.

Unfortunately, some time in the mid-1990s, all the goyem figured out the Jews were actually having more fun than them.  Now everyone thinks Christmas means Chinese and movie.  Ruined it.

Like Yogi Berra once said: Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

Cartoons.  Christmas used to mean cool cartoons.  Charlie Brown, of course.  Speaking of sickly little trees that shed.  And The Grinch.  As someone who didn’t know any better, those shows taught me that Christmas isn’t about buying stuff.  It’s about a deeper spirituality and the brotherhood of mankind.  Sounds nice.  Warms the cockles and all that.

But then you grow up and pretty soon you do know better.  Just look around you.  I tried stopping by the pizzeria after work last Friday.  The traffic was an absolute shit show, backed up for blocks in every direction as mobs of Christmas zombies headed for the mall.  It was like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  You know the one I’m talking about.

There were other cool cartoons, stuff that was a little less clear on the message but offered fun/weird/creepy claymation to stare at and strange/wonderful songs.  Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and that other one with the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser.  That was my favorite.

The Yule Log.  Christmas definitely meant the Yule Log.

I guess it was similar in a lotta places.  In New York City one of the local TV stations, not one of the networks, would show a video loop of a burning log in a fireplace while really saccharine Christmas music with lots of strings played in the background.  That was the whole show.  Hour after hour after hour.

Almost no one in New York had a fire place, so I guess it kinda made sense.  We all had steam radiators.  Things just blast the heat.  Even in the depths of winter you can leave your windows open.

The Yule Log was truly surreal.  As a kid, I would just stare at it, transfixed, my mind lost in some indescribable amalgam of wonderment and boredom.  The show just reinforced the notion that Christmas meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, most of it too bizarre to make much sense of.

That inability to nail down Christmas only increased as I got older and learned more history.  The obvious schism and tension nowadays is between the religious Christian holiday and the rank commercialism, but there’s an older tension as well.  Because so much of what we think of as Christmas has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus; rather, it’s mostly leftover from old pagan holidays and rituals.

The tree, the lights, St. Nick.  The goddamn reindeer.  I got news for ya: There were no reindeer in the manger.

All of it comes from pre-Christian northern Europe.  Heck, I just found out that even Yule itself, as in the miraculous log and the joyous tide, is an old Germanic word referring to an ancient pagan winter holiday.

Wish someone a happy “yuletide?”  That’s a whole level of War-On-Christmas that even FOXNews hasn’t picked up on yet.  Shit, they oughta just rename it the Odin Log.

So Christmas comes at you from a bunch of different directions.  Its about Jesus.  But it’s also about keeping the economy afloat by buying lots of shit for other people and then returning half of it.  And it’s also about doing cool Pagan things like almost setting a tree on fire.  Then there’s all the Victorian stuff I didn’t even mention like Christmas cards and the big Christmas feast with goose (cheaper than beef and turkey back then).

So what is Christmas really all about?  I have no idea.  But for now, I’ll stick with the Snow Miser.

Merry Christmas everyone.