Reconsidering the Holidays

I hate the holidays, or at least that is what I have been saying for the past ten years or so. The last time I can remember enjoying the holidays was when I spent Christmas with my then-girlfriend's family. They made me feel included, part of the family.

If asked, I could spend hours listing all the reasons I hated Christmas, most of them legitimate: commercialism, consumerism, hypocrisy, gluttony, and on and on. But the truth is that I was covering my real feelings.

I like the holidays. As a child, this was my favorite time of year, and not just because of the presents. I liked the decorations, the lights, the tree, the food, the attempt everyone seemed (to my young mind) to make to be cheerful, and all the Christmas cartoons on television (especially Charlie Brown). I liked that for a few days each year there seemed to be magic all around me. I even liked the Christmas Eve Mass, especially the one time I saw it done in Latin. I was eight years old before I quit believing in Santa Claus (and only last year discovered the horrible truth about the Great Pumpkin).

When my father died (I was thirteen), Christmas ended for my family. We still put up a tree and went through the motions. I assumed my father's role of making Christmas morning waffles. But it never again felt like Christmas. I never would have admitted it then, or even a year ago, but that loss saddened me.

We are exposed to so much propaganda in the media about how this time of year is when families are close and loving, no matter how tough the rest of the year might be. Part of me buys into that crap, even though I know it isn't true for many of us. Instead of allowing myself to wish I had a healthy, happy family at the holidays, I rejected the holidays, period.

This year, for the first time in my life, I have no family at all for the holidays. Both my mother and my sister died this past year. I have no extended family. Strangely enough, this is the first year that I have allowed myself to have some holiday spirit.

I got a small live tree and some decorations. I sent out the picture at the top of this post to my friends and clients. I bought a scented candle that reminds me of the holidays when I was a child (vanilla-cinnamon). I even wished my co-workers Merry Christmas before I left the gym on Friday. All these are things that I would not have done last year.

No matter how trivialized Christmas becomes in this country, the holiday still carries an enormous amount of archetypal power. This holiday represents the primacy of the child--the hope and redemption that comes with the birth of Spirit in human form. Whether you believe in the Jesus story or not isn't even relevant. One need not be a Christian to appreciate the power of the story.

During the darkest time of the year, a child is born who brings Spirit into the world. The child's birth is accompanied by signs and omens, all of which serve to highlight the auspicious birth. The fact that the child is born to humble parents who have no special status accentuates the child's role as one of the common folk, and the truth that we need not be priests or kings to become a leader, to embody Spirit.

The early Christians decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus at this time of year in an effort to co-opt the pagan traditions that were being celebrated around the winter solstice. It was a perfect fit. Both traditions were about renewal and finding the light--the hope, the promise--always present even in the darkest time of the year.

This message is often lost amid sales, shopping, parties, and for some of us, depression. Many people suffer their worst bouts of depression during the holidays because they do not have the perfect "Waltons" family Christmas. Moreover, they do not or cannot connect with the deeper meaning of the season. I know because I was one of those people.

I think this reflects a deeper issue. We have lost touch with our mythic heritage. I am not advocating that we elevate mythic knowledge to some great transpersonal salvation. What I am advocating is a healthy Spiral.

Mythic awareness starts in the Purple Meme of the Spiral and evolves steadily until Orange begins to reject all that is not rational. Even Orange has its myths (think about the Faust story), but they are more intellectual than emotional. The myths from lower levels of the Spiral have a strong emotional core that anchors us in our body, and by extension, in our history as a species. We lose a lot when we lose that heritage.

Many of us have rejected these aspects of the earlier stages as prerational or prepersonal nonsense. Even those who are still anchored in a Blue Meme worldview tend to only allow the validity of their own myth, generally Christianity in this country. These people lose a lot in rejecting the rest of their mythic heritage.

It's only recently (since I started revising my Birth of a Poet lectures) that I have started to see how much I have lost personally in rejecting mythic consciousness. Allowing the holidays back into my life, even in a limited way, helps me in the process of reclaiming the parts of myself that I have lost or hidden.

Becoming integral is about becoming whole. I cannot be a whole person unless I reclaim the missing parts of my life and my identity--not in an ego way, although that is part of it, but in a soulful way. The life of the soul doesn't much care about developmental levels. It only seeks meaning and connection wherever it finds it.