Happy Everything
For anyone who has tried to temporarily tune out the ever-lengthening pre-Christmas juggernaut, the coming days offer a motherlode of opportunities to embrace the holiday season within a more conventional timeframe.
If you studiously ignored your neighbors’ immediate replacement of an inflatable Jack-o-lantern with an inflatable Santa, you may have persisted too long and inadvertently missed the local tree-lighting ceremony or Christmas parade. Good news: In the remaining days — which are the true core of the holiday season — there is no shortage of meaningful, entertaining and timely things to do.
You can shop for gifts, of course, since you probably delayed that, too. You can also do things like tour historic homes in period Christmas décor, catch a tear-inducing choral performance or, in a more secular vein, participate in a Kwanzaa celebration (Dec. 21-Jan. 1) or take a “Journey to the North Pole” even if it’s 70 degrees outside.
You can watch one of countless Christmas movies, the names of which are familiar to everyone. But, alas, you can longer visit the oddly incongruous Christmas-decorated miniature village on Monkey Island at the Jackson, Mississippi, zoo, which long ago bit the dust.
There is no official statewide compendium of events during the final holiday stretch, but there are obvious alternatives to frantically searching for a parking space at the mall or rewatching “It’s a Wonderful Life.” A great many of them – though certainly not all – naturally revolve around the traditional namesake celebration of Jesus’s reputed D.O.B. For the devout (or for people who put up their trees late and drag their feet when it comes to taking them down), there are the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas – the sacred season, not the annoying song, which actually start on Christmas Day.
Though conservatives have long decried an ostensible “war on Christmas,” citing efforts to accommodate the sensitivities of people who don’t personally celebrate Jesus’s birth, there’s no need to give that more than a passing thought — no need to avoid saying “Merry Christmas” to someone who celebrates the “mass” of Christ, nor to bestowing appropriate glad tidings upon someone who doesn’t.
As this site notes, the holiday itself predates use of the word “Christmas” by several centuries. And if a war on Christmas truly existed, the argument could be made that it actually began with the buzzkill Pilgrims, who attempted to ban Yuletide celebrations in colonial America. “Happy Holidays from Plymouth Rock,” Bill O’Reilly. (Unsurprisingly, given the country’s contemporary holiday mania, Plymouth, Massachusetts now shamelessly does up Christmas just like everyone else.)
Thanks to the First Amendment, Americans are free to celebrate religious holidays however they choose – or not. They are also free to celebrate the (spoiler alert!) imaginary arrival of Santa Claus, a mythical superhero/benefactor/child-judge modeled after an actual Christian monk, St. Nicholas, who lived not at the North Pole but in Turkey, where his hometown claims to have his skeletal remains and sports an archway built of concrete vertebra with a modern image of a jolly, heavyset man in decidedly unTurkish garb. Trot that out when some kid starts boasting about discovering Santa Claus isn’t real.
Seasonal celebrants are also free to mix and match, such as by installing figures of Santa and his reindeer, suspended by wires, seemingly on the verge of crash-landing into a Nativity scene, as one friend recalled of a neighbor’s lawn installation near Learned, Mississippi.
The point is, although Christmas is rooted in Christian theology, it is also part of an expansive and inclusive celebratory season that originally took its cues from a pagan bacchanal. It’s doubtless over-commercialized, but there’s no reason for anyone to get their dander up about it becoming more accommodating of nonbelievers. In the time remaining, it’s best to just enjoy the ride.
The all-access pass this year coincides with the arrival of Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish celebration that centers on exchanging gifts and lighting a candle on a menorah each night (also, spinning the dreidel). Hanukkah begins at sundown on Christmas day and lasts until Jan. 2, 2025. Bonus crossover: Jesus, a Jew, also celebrated Hanukkah, according to many theological accounts, including one described on this site.
In a seemingly unexpected turn during Hanukkah 2023, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a conservative southern Baptist, participated in a Jewish celebration at the state Capitol, though he chose to give it a political imprimatur. Reeves took to Instagram to say that he was “honored” to help light a menorah, and to express his support for the nation of Israel, which was (and remains) at war with Palestinians and allied nations and groups. “Jewish people are once again facing persecution around the world,” Reeves declared. “Let me be clear - Mississippi stands with them and the state of Israel during this difficult time!”
Speaking of glad tidings and good cheer, many practicing Jews also celebrate a secular form of Christmas. The same goes for Muslims, some of whom, according to this NPR report, spend Christmas day reading passages in the Quran about Jesus’s birth. Islam reveres Jesus as a prophet and a messiah born of the Virgin Mary, without endorsing the Christian narrative that he was crucified and resurrected and was the true son of God. In Selcuk, Turkey, which is predominately Muslim, Mother Mary’s zero-lot-line patio home, to which she purportedly retired after Jesus’s death, is today a shrine where Christian mass is annually celebrated on Christmas Eve.
Among the many other remaining options closer to home are going to all those closing-season parties, visiting with friends and loved ones who are home for the holidays, going to a reverent, candlelit midnight mass, and riding around looking at other people’s decorations, which can range from tastefully curated to outlandishly over-the-top and, sometimes, to endearingly if wince-inducingly homespun.
It’s Christmas everywhere now. As one inmate observed during the last pre-holiday session of a prison book club that I facilitate near Woodville, Mississippi, that is the case even if your point of holiday access is the screen of a communal cellblock tablet, during a video call with family and friends.
Happy Everything.
Image: Alfenette Robinson and friends ride in a Bolton, Mississippi Christmas parade (via WAPT-TV)
A fun read.