Reclaiming Christmas

Six years ago, my mother committed suicide six days before Christmas. Needless to say, the holidays weren’t exactly jolly.

In my world, Jesus’ birth never brought anything but broken promises, lumpy gravy, dead pigs, and reindeer sweaters. Adding funerals to the list didn’t make it any better.

As an anti-commercialist vegetarian, the month of misery usually serves to strengthen my position. December forever reminds me of dead family members, despair, and disillusionment. I know I’m not alone. Thousands of people fear the most stressful time of year. At every corner you turn, America’s multi-billion dollar advertising industry gladly reminds you of your inadequacy, lack of money, family, friends, or love of meat. This time of year, there’s no room for you inside society’s norms of normalcy. Here’s the season for depression, heart attacks, suicide, and sorrow.  

As a child, I remember crying desperately outside my mother’s door for hours, hoping she’d come out to share the Christmas meal with grandma and me. Sometimes she emerged from her dark cave right before my dad rang the doorbell. Then she rushed back into her abode of misery. Cursing me for letting the devil in. Other times she stayed in her room until we went home. I left my neatly decorated and carefully selected gifts outside her door along with my tears for years.

Until I realized, I make myself wallow in misery. I don’t have to keep telling myself the same cruel Christmas carol every year. I hold the power to change. The past remains the past, but the future’s all mine. This year, I start making new traditions. I’ll immerse myself in yoga and meditation instead of Macy’s madness. I’ll design cards with personalized poems for my friends. My marinated Tofurky will make meat lovers reconsider their dead birds. I’ll even light a candle for my mother, and pray I can forgive her after six sorrowful years. This year, I reclaim Christmas. Meditation, creation, forgiveness, and flow. Now if that’s not a proper way to celebrate Christ, I don’t know what is.