Santa, Baby Jesus, and Christmases Past

[mellicious]

I have sort of a fraught relationship with the holidays, nowadays. I guess a lot of people do. I used to love Christmas. I was brought up in what would now be called an evangelical family - Baptists, and in Texas (Southern Baptist, which didn't especially mean anything to me back then). So I was taught that the story of Jesus' birth was absolutely factual, but I don't know that I really internalized it that way. (I remember that when I was little, I thought that when we sang "Jesus Loves Me" and it said "the Bible tells me so" that the Bible was, like, a fairy or something. I just think little kids don't really take in all that stuff, do they? I thought that maybe Jesus was real and maybe fairies might be, too!)

Anyway, the thing was, nobody made any effort to separate out the religious and the non-religious aspects of Christmas. But we always went to my grandparents' house for Christmas, and we didn't go to church on Christmas Eve, that I recall, or do anything specifically religious other than somebody saying a prayer before dinner. (Which was something we always did for formal meals, so that wasn't anything out of the ordinary, either.)

Even after I decided as a teenager that I didn't actually believe all that stuff (meaning religion in general, not just Santa Claus and fairies!), it really didn't change the way I thought about Christmas a whole lot. I no longer thought that the stories were literally true, if I ever did, but I still enjoyed Christmas. Actually I think I'm kind of a natural skeptic - I started poking holes in the Santa Claus story earlier than a lot of kids do, and I suspect I felt the same way about religion generally, even if it took me a kind of a long time to admit it to myself.

I guess it also made a difference to me, in a way, that I was in choir (school choir and church choir both, for a long time) and honestly, when it comes to Christmas music, religious Christmas music tends to be superior to the secular stuff. They may not play much of it on iHeart radio, but when you're singing in four-part harmony, Christmas carols are the best.

I used to think that I wished I could be a believer, because it would make life easier. I don't really think that any more, but I do wish we could do Christmas the way we used to, just celebrate it in our own irreligious way without worrying about it. I don't much think that's possible any more, though. The blasted War on Christmas business has made that impossible, at least for me.