So This Is Christmas

What's so bad about ritual?

This is the eight Christmas my wife and I are spending with my parents (her parents are in China, and their big Christmas-equivalent holiday is the Chinese New Year, in January or February.) I like to say that we basically get an extra “holiday season” in that cold, deep part of winter. We haven’t gotten to visit China in quite awhile, but every year we make fancy dishes for a whole week and video call her family. It’s quite nice.

Despite changes in menu, venue (we hosted last Christmas), or timing (sometimes we have to travel home the day after Christmas, other times we stay a little later), there are some things that stay the same. We pack everything but the cats in the car the night before—owing to the temperature, we even usually pack the cooler with some food we bring up—and wake up at 6am to head to New Jersey, which is the only way to make the trip in under four hours.

Christmas dinner is always a prime rib. We get some Italian and German charcuterie and sausage from a couple of great delis up north in Jersey, and usually stop at this big thrift shop on the way home. We usually ask my dad to play these cringey Christmas songs we recorded when I was a kid with mikes from Guitar Center and some Midi files. (When I was a kid I ran away when my parents played it; “Woodolph the wed-nosed weindee-ah,” is about all I sing, and it’s enough.)

Over the years, these discrete little things and many more turn into “Christmas.” At some point they become rituals, things you do because you do them. It would be wrong to feel that you haven’t really had Christmas if you miss one of these things. But it also wouldn’t be quite right to dispense with them. The form is not the substance, but it contains it.

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My wife and I were were talking about megachurches—I showed her a picture of one in Fairfax, which looked to me like a supersized auto garage and had a big stage and stadium seating inside. You do you, but personally—I’m Catholic, so what else would I think?—it seems odd to do religious worship in a setting and format so shorn from tradition or ritual. Not that you can’t worship God that way; God doesn’t need it. I more think it’s we who need it—that ritual directs us, channels us.

“Why does religion need to be ritualistic?” my wife asked. (Her family was never really religious, and China doesn’t really have a single defining transcendental religion in the sense that the Western world has Christianity.) What I mused was that it wasn’t about religion, per se: everything humans do takes some form with repetition and continuity over time. That’s how I started thinking about our Christmas traditions, and how time hallows things.

I suppose this very different approach to worship is also a “ritual” in its own way, just a very different one. And perhaps I just like the idea of continuity, repetition, and the quasi-metaphysical idea that by engaging in it we can in some sense take part in the past. I guess I might even say, as I think about it, that the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is really an elevated example of how tradition and time work for us humans in general. So maybe it is just the Catholic in me. No judgment at all implied if that’s not you.

But I like the idea that time is a cycle, and that we can participate in the same thing many times throughout our lives. And today, that happens to be Christmas.

What are your Christmas traditions? Or do you like to do things differently over the years or change it up? And if Christmas isn’t your holiday, how do you think about celebrating your big one year over year?

Merry Christmas!

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Related Reading:

Give Thanks To The Lord, For He Is Good

The Rhythm of the Seasons

The Christmas Clock

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