I grew up in a home without much spirituality or church affiliation. It’s not that I didn’t attend church. I did. I attended many different churches.
I did attend the bible school in the Lutheran church a couple of blocks away from my home when I was about eight years old. I could walk to the church in good weather, and occasionally got a ride with a friend in bad weather.
As a young child I was in”awe” to say the least, of the beautiful interior, and massive exterior of the Catholic Church my grandmother took me to about twice a year. We would take the bus to get to the church about 5 miles away. In fact we did not get a car until my mother bought one when I was about 12 years old. Up until then, living in Detroit, you took mass transit, street cars, then buses that supplanted the street cars that took me most any where I went.
When I was about 12, my best friend and I took “lessons” from the local Episcopal church, so we could both be baptised. To the clergy and church staff, we must have seemed like two lost souls that might be saved by the ceremony of Baptism.
I remember feeling so “cleansed” as the ceremony proceeded that day. Not one of our family members came to watch us we went through the ceremony, but we had such a gathering of congratulations from church members, it didn’t really matter.
As I grew into a teenager, I attended other denominations, including a Russian Orthodox Church, thinking I needed to impress my new Russian boyfriend. After one year, I moved onto other boyfriends and other religions.
Christmas came every year, as usually, as did Hanukkah, as our family had many Jewish friends. And every year, until she died when I was 14, my grandmother would put out a table full of Christmas goodies a week before Christmas, and put it away after the New Year.
When I think back about childhood Christmas memories, and what my child’s eyes saw, I remember the crystal nut bowl, and the nut cracker, and nut pics. I remember the gold foiled chocolates wrapped up took like gold coins. They never tasted very good, but maybe it was the gold foil that made them special. I remember the hard, but nutty tasting Pfeffernusse cookies. I remember fruit cake, sliced thinly, packed with candied fruit and nuts. I remember the bottle of Canadian whiskey, and wine put out with the crystal glasses that no one touched, except my step grandfather, who drank when we were not looking. I remember the early morning preparation of the turkey. I don’t remember a time we did not have turkey for Christmas. I remember the gravy being prepared. All the time my grandmother cutting up the giblets, and making sure there were no lumps in the gravy. I remember my mother, on one of the rare times, work side by side with my Grandmother to help prepare the meal.
I also remember times that needed to not have happened or been associated at all with this time of the year. Never was there a year that my mother did not get drunk, on drinking Christian Brothers Brandy, on Christmas Eve. She gave her reason for doing so; because it was her sorrow over the death of my Grandfather, 12 years before I was born. I can remember some fights, verbal fights happening, and the swearing and nasty language. As a small child, I could not leave the situation. I felt helpless and scared. As I got older, I would run across the street, to be sheltered by my best friends mother.
I often wondered during these times, asking for Jesus and God to intercede, why they had not. I prayed for help, I prayed that God would stop all of the violence. As a child, I hoped for peace and quiet, but mostly peace. I learned that I could not depend on my “spiritual” church upbringing to deal with my sometimes harsh childhood situations. As I grew up, I learned I had to take my own life in my own hands, and make mistakes and learn from them along the way. Maybe that made me tougher. But mostly, I think I learned I needed to instill a sense of peace and security into my children.
My children are now both grown, with fine careers, and children of their own. I was not a perfect Mother, no one is, and it took me time to realize that, but happily I see the security and peace my children have passed on and given their own children and their friends also.
As I look to assimilate, and dissect my feelings about what Christmas means to me today, I think it mostly means a time of continually instilling peace, in my family, and in my relationships with others. It’s a time of again looking at each person, not one little part of that person I may be turned off from, whether it’s an action or word, but to take in the whole person as someone very special and unique in our world.
Each of us can never know what a stranger, or friend for that matter, has churning in their thoughts, what worries they might keep to themselves, their insecurities, their doubts. I can never know that.
Sometimes, I am not the queen of patience with others, and I have pet peeves that I have tried to learn to disregard, trying to be more observant, and courteous of others which has been a lesson in itself. I have a ways to go. Maybe it is the old age thing, the acquiring of wisdom that let us disregard the unimportant. In recent years, my favorite saying to myself and others is, “Will it matter in a hundred years?”
My attendance, in recent years, at Christian based churches has stopped. My partner and I attend the Unity Church in Dallas once in awhile, and he and I always try to make a service at the Unity Church in KC when we travel to see friends there. I am happy to say we have many friends from both sides of the isles of spiritually; from Southern Baptist to Unitarian, to Atheist. We also have friends whose sexual orientation is and would be turned away from many of the churches around us. I think our life has been enriched by the people we know. I hope we have given back to others 110% of what we have received in those friendships.
So today, Christmas to me, as a baby boomer living in a Southern Baptist area of Texas, doesn’t just represent the celebration of the birth of Jesus according to the Christian religion, and as I used to believe as a child. To me Christmas represents a day for the review of how to care for our relationships with others, how to care and share with our neighbors and our world. It means a day or thinking how we can learn about and tolerate other cultures and religions in our life, how we can be more spiritually bonded and connected with all of mankind, and how to make our close relationships even closer.
Merry Christmas and a very Happy Creative New year to all of you.
The Golden Rule
http://www.loyno.edu/twomey/blueprint/vol_lv/No-06_Feb_2002.html
