A Variety of Ways Not to Have Christmas

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/us/25beliefs.html

A Variety of Ways Not to Have Christmas
By MARK OPPENHEIMER

It’s a holiday from work and school. It’s wrapping paper torn and
scattered about the tree. For the fortunate, it’s a family dinner with
good food and minimal drama. But for two groups of people in
particular, Christmas is a time to feel like a minority.

First, there are those Christians committed to resisting the holiday’s
materialism; second, there are those who do not celebrate Christmas at
all. This week I asked members of both groups what their Christmases
would be like. Here is a sampling of what they said:

Rod Dreher of Philadelphia, author of “Crunchy Cons: The New
Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots” and a member of
the Eastern Orthodox Church: “Orthodoxy preserves the older Christian
understanding of the weeks leading up to Christmas as a time of
penance, like Lent before Easter. You can imagine how difficult this
is to pull off when everybody else is chowing down on holiday party
food.

“But Orthodoxy insists that if the fast is only about abstaining from
food, it’s meaningless. You also have to abstain from anger, and
everything that separates you from God. I’ve been working on my temper
during this Nativity fast season, on trusting God’s providence in
difficult situations and on learning how to see God in everyone. It’s
hard — but that’s the point, isn’t it?”

David Silverman of Cranford, N.J., president of American Atheists: “On
Christmas, I hide under the table and sit in a fetal position. No,
that’s not true. I don’t celebrate it. My wife is Jewish by religion,
so we have a mixed marriage. My daughter, who’s 13, is an atheist 357
days of the year, and the other 8 days, she is a Jew. She doesn’t hide
that at all.

“I never celebrate Christmas. The one thing I do is I go to my
friends’ parties. If they have a Christmas party I am all there.”

Heidi Miller Yoder, an assistant professor of religion at Eastern
Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va.: “Some Mennonites have been
very intentional about spending no more than $100 on Christmas gifts.
It’s a movement not only within the Mennonite Church but within the
larger Christian church.

“Other families have deliberately said, ‘We will only do homemade
gifts.’ In my extended family, we donate gifts instead, and for the
children, we do give them some gifts, realizing that it’s adults who
distinguish between needs and wants, and they are learning to do
that.”

David Semonian, who works at the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ world
headquarters, in Brooklyn Heights: “We don’t celebrate Christmas, and
the primary reason is because the Bible doesn’t direct us to do so.
Jesus commanded us to commemorate his death, and not his birth. We
have the day off, and enjoy getting together with our families and
children, but it wouldn’t be a time of giving gifts or any implication
we are celebrating the holiday.”

Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit seminarian and the author of “The
Sojourn,” a novel to be published in May: “I grew up in a house where,
early on, there was almost as much Slovak as English spoken, the
Christmas Eve dinner of fish, soup, and oplatki wafers (and a bit of
brandy, of course) seemed almost more important than Christmas Day
itself. No doubt because it was a gathering of family without all the
trappings of Christmas Day, but maybe, too, because it led right into
Mass at midnight.

“So I do the best I can to approximate my grandmother’s and my
mother’s old menu, and somehow we always manage to have more than
ourselves around the table, which is nice.

“And while it’s hard now to get to midnight Mass with three kids under
5, if someone’s willing to baby-sit, my wife and I slip out to church
still, and come back with only a few hours before the whole house
wakes up, but satisfied in a simple way that Christmas remains for us
a season of holy days.”

Janet Gyatso, professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity
School: “I grew up Jewish, and my own practice is a mix of Judaism and
Buddhism and being a critical intellectual and not identifying with
the practice of any of it, per se. But Buddhism teaches one to be as
generous and open-minded as possible. Any remaining feelings of being
excluded from Christmas as a kid have simply vanished for me as an
adult. One just takes pleasure from it all.”

Angel Falcon, a student at Rutgers School of Law in Newark and a
practitioner of Palo Mayombe, a traditional Afro-Cuban religion: “I
don’t take offense when people say, ‘Merry Christmas.’ When you’re
Latino, Christmas and Jesus play an important role even if you’re not
Christian. I like to say that Jesus and I don’t have a problem. His
crew can be a little annoying, but he’s fine.”

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