I confess I missed the “War on Christmas” last year. I work in retail and it is obviously our busiest time. I didn’t notice many skirmishes but we did have a few customers who seemed reluctant to say “Merry Christmas” and one who insisted on wishing me felicitations of the holy day in a way that suggested she was not happy nor did she care if I had a jolly time or not. So after last season’s furor over holiday greetings and decorations, I had hoped we’d come to some sort of understanding about the winter holidays but, alas, I was wrong.

One of the world’s largest retailers has bowed to the will of its demographic and has returned “Merry Christmas” to the lips of its employees and the plastic signs of its sale bins. Lest I be buried with a stake of holly through my heart for not saying “Merry Christmas,” I’d like to offer an olive branch — or more appropriately a mistletoe bough — in this pernicious little skirmish so that I and you may get on with celebrating our holidays this year.

Like many cranky middle-aged Southerners, I acknowledge that I live in a world gone topsy-turvy. My grandmother taught me good manners and I mostly still practice them—yes, sir; no, ma’am; please pass the tofu. I try to remember which religion my friends adhere to and I wish them greetings appropriate to the season. My grandmother didn’t hold with forcing your religion onto other people and would have been appalled at Southerners with the bad manners and incivility to force a holiday down everyone’s gullet, whether they celebrated it or not.

Both my cultural upbringing — my raising, as we term it here in the mountains — and my spiritual tradition enjoin me to offer hospitality. Most people’s religions do the same. Here at the darkest time of the year, we are faced with many expressions of our souls’ hopes and fears in the dregs of the old year, expressions that have come to this country in the hearts of immigrants for centuries, as well as those that were here in the indigenous populations to begin with.

As we come to the White Solstice in December, we stand with the harvest behind us and months to go before anything can be grown to feed us. The nights grow darker and the daylight hours shorten—we ingather to conserve energy and to cheer our hearts. We share stories out of our cultural past as well as the bounty of what we have stored to see us through the winter, whether we canned from our own gardens or went by the grocery store for eggnog on our way home from work.

These cultural and religious expressions take many forms. The dominant one in this country is related to the dominant religious force here, Christianity.

No matter what your personal celebration may be, your world-view in December is dominated by the trappings of Christmas and runs the gamut from Santa and his reindeer to the Blessed Virgin and her Child. But Christmas is not the only holy day celebrated by your neighbors and co-workers and friends.

In any given year, we might see December celebrations of Yule, Solstice, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Divali and Kwanzaa, in addition to Christmas. And the “Christmas” season itself — which until Dec. 25 is correctly called the Advent season — holds different cultural celebrations, including but not limited to St. Lucia’s Day, St. Nicholas’ Day and Los Posadas.

None of these celebrations diminish our own understanding of what our ancestors did and the traditions we follow to honor them and the season. Rather than risk the ire of my southern grandmother’s mannerly spirit, it seems better to be a good neighbor and wish someone a “happy holiday” if you don’t know which one they celebrate than to snap a mean-spirited “Merry Christmas” because you feel threatened and put-upon. Where’s the threat?

Each one of these spiritual expressions, these holy days, has its own trappings of decorations and food and greetings and its deeper teaching about family and survival and how to treat strangers who come to your door, whether they bear tamales, mead, fruitcake or frankincense. The way we survive the season, no, the way we thrive in this season, is to remember that we are not alone, that there’s something cooking in the kitchen and that we are blessed beyond measure by both. It is a time to remember what we have and to share the bounty, if we can.

The young sun of the winter solstice promises crops in the summer to store for next winter, and our tribe, however we define it, will be fed.

Full bellies, gracious hospitality.

And so the wheel turns and the cycle continues, by whatever name you call it.

Byron Ballard is a Dianic Wiccan high priestess with Notre Dame de l’Herbe Mouillee. She lives in Asheville.

Source: Asheville Citizen-Times

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 12:53 pm and is filed under World, Activism & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.