Christmas is Christmas
Every December—well, now it starts like the day after Halloween—people in America begin decorating for Christmas. Elaborate lights go up on the exterior of houses. Inflatable characters sprout up in front yards. Chairs get smashed into bedroom corners and lamps get shoved behind doors just so the interiors of our houses have space to accommodate a tree.
We do what we do.
And we do what we do in large part because that’s what the people who came before us did. It’s what the people around us are doing. It’s tradition. We decorate and shop and cook and gather to honor and celebrate the birth of Jesus, ultimately. Though that’s more often an afterthought than an impetus, it seems. But that’s how the holiday got its name. Then somehow, along the way, a chubby dude in a red suit was stirred into the mix, as well as elves with pointy ears and reindeer who fly and all sorts of other fun and funky ideas. Still Christmas, at its core, is a religious holiday. Created to commemorate the birth of Christ, it is a seminal event rooted in Roman culture, stemming from Western Christianity, and celebrated in December through rituals as distinct as at least three corners of the world.
Everybody puts their own spin on the deal, but we’re all trying to do the same thing. At the end of the year, across the globe, people talk and think about Jesus as they chase off evil and run toward good.
In the Ukraine, Christmas trees are decorated with spider webs, and most of the trinkets that hang from the branches are spiders made of paper and wire. The Ukrainian custom honors the legend of a poor widow and her kids who made a makeshift tree out of pinecones but had no money to buy decorations. The family awoke one morning to find the cobwebs that had accumulated on the tree shimmering like silver and gold in the sunlight streaming through the window. Legend has it that this is where and when tinsel was born.
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In Sweden, it’s all about a straw goat. The handmade livestock creatures can be found everywhere—in windows, on front porches, hanging from branches of trees. Towns build larger versions of them and put them on display in the city squares where people gather around and take pictures while placing bets on whether the goats will make it until Christmas, as someone always tries to burn them down. Rightly so. Straw goat burning is a centuries old yuletide tradition marking the destruction of a once “accidental” Norse god. Destroying the straw goat by fire is the Swedes’ symbolistic way of ensuring that the sun will return and that harvests will be bountiful in the upcoming year. In Gavle, Sweden a giant goat is erected in exactly the same spot at Castle Square every year. The Gavle Goat is approximately 42 feet high, 23 feet wide, and it weighs 3.6 tons. Ironically, around the clock protection is provided to prevent arsonists from burning it to the ground.
In Norway, people hide their brooms. It’s a widely held notion that toward the end of the year, witches and evil spirits come looking for vehicles to ride around on. So, the Norwegians do their part to thwart meanness by locking away their favorite form of transportation on December 24th. In celebration of the broom hiding, they also exchange gifts, dress up, and go around the neighborhoods singing songs, kind of like a mash-up of caroling and trick-or-treating.
In Mexico they carve radishes. In Japan they eat fried chicken. In Austria they run from a scary monster man called Krampus who stuffs children in a wicker basket.
Christmas is Christmas wherever you go. But it sure doesn’t look the same.
In one way or another, everybody everywhere has a ritual they adhere here to that feels as common as the rising sun. It’s what they know. It’s how things work. It’s what they’ve always done. And yet the guys who build the goats do things we don’t understand. We can’t imagine spiders on our trees or hiding all our brooms. That feels dumb here in America where reindeer fly and we put stars on top our trees. We don’t always “get” other people’s familiar. But that doesn’t make them wrong. In fact, our Christmas celebrations might be expanded by the understanding of what others choose to do. Aha moments come when we realize a lot of different roads can lead to the very same place.
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In Taylor Sheridan’s blockbuster television series, Yellowstone, John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) is the wealthy, powerful patriarch of one of Montana’s founding families. John Dutton is devoted to the land. Montana is his earthly God, and he will do anything to protect its mountains, fields, and streams. Somewhere in the middle of the series’ dysfunctional family storylines, its brutal and frequent death and destruction scenes, and its nostalgic bow to cowboy lore, a new character is introduced. An environmentalist, appropriately named Summer (played by Piper Perabo), arrives leading her fellow Californian activists to God’s country to make a stink about humans eating meat. Her tactics run her head on into the Dutton family-- their livelihood, their wealth and power, and most importantly their bone deep beliefs. We don’t know where her storyline is going yet, but it’s easy to see where it might. Though Summer and John Dutton live entirely different lives, when the means are stripped from both, they’re really about the same end. They both want nothing more than to protect the land.
People in the Ukraine celebrate Christ’s birth with spider webs. People in Sweden, with straw goats. We do it with a fat guy who breaks in our house through a chimney. Summer wants to protect the animals by not polluting the river. John wants to protect the animals by not polluting the river. Our differences make us more alike than we’d sometimes like to admit.
What if all kinds of knots could be loosened by simply working backward? By starting with what we want at the end and unpacking the different ways there are to get there, we might find, like Summer and John, that we have more in common than we think. Perhaps, this holiday season, regardless of the rituals we keep, it would behoove us to re-look for ground we share. We might be pretty surprised at how quickly and safely we can all get to where we are going—which just might be the very same place.