You’re spent. So is every discretionary dime in your pocket. At this moment, you’d choose medication over meditation.
And how many shopping hours remain until Dec. 24?
Our Christmas is excessive. We eat, drink and buy too much. We relax, recharge and reflect too little. Then, wondering why we feel empty, we surround ourselves with other empty people and exchange neckties and oven mitts.
“It’s so easy,” said Gloria Finch of Minot, “to take out that piece of plastic and go to the store.”
Finch is someone the iPod generation might not understand. Imagine growing up without a television in your home!
Her common sense is refreshing. So are two thoughtful volumes I’ve recently read on the subject of Christmas commercialism. They’ve convinced me that we can reject a spiritually bankrupt holiday and reclaim it for the good guys.
But be ready to feel like a Lone Ranger, and brace yourself to be labeled a Grinch.
Bill McKibben, author of “Hundred Dollar Holiday” (1998, Simon & Schuster), argues that the real Grinches are “those relentless commercial forces who have spent more than a century trying to convince us” that Christmas is found in a department store.
Gifts were treasured
That’s not where Finch looks for the holiday. A widowed grandmother of 21-month-old twins, she spreads her Christmas joy by blending love and ingenuity.
The Mechanic Falls-born Finch lived in Waterloo, Iowa, for 50 years. During one holiday season there, she welcomed her husband, Ken, and several of his fellow police officers home from a successful pheasant hunt.
She loved the birds’ red and green plumes so much that she saved them. Then Finch cut the feathers into half-inch lengths and wove them into hats, which she presented to her aunts as Christmas gifts.
“They are still beautiful and just as colorful to this day,” said Finch of those long-ago gifts. “When my aunts passed away, I helped clean out their houses. That’s how I got the hats back. It pleased me so much to find that they had kept them all those years.”
These days, the remodeled schoolhouse where Finch lives could easily be confused with Santa’s workshop. It’s filled with ceramic pigs, mugs and doll clothes, much like ones she has crafted for family and friends.
Other folks’ handmade treats inhabit cherished space in Finch’s living room, too. There’s a star made of five giant pine cones and dried berries. Also, a sign celebrating the family home with a hand-carved, wooden songbird adorning each corner.
“It’s so much nicer,” said Finch, “when people personalize things.”
So overwhelmed
In “Unplug the Christmas Machine” (1991, William Morrow and Co.), Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli argue that a Christmas stripped of the personal touch isn’t Christmas.
Robinson and Staeheli host seminars nationwide. They’ve heard from thousands of women who feel overwhelmed by the need to “create the perfect holiday,” men who feel increasingly detached from the celebration and children who request a litany of name-brand gifts but covet quality time with their parents most of all.
Sound familiar?
“Most people are caught up in a labyrinth of holiday plans and projects,” the authors write. “It’s not that they don’t like the holiday. They don’t like what’s happened to it.”
Unlike McKibben, the women don’t suggest a strict guideline for restoring fiscal sanity. But they do embrace a spiritual approach that won’t hurt anyone’s bank account.
Non-material gifts are one of Robinson and Staeheli’s recurring themes. Offer gifts of time, such as promises to do household chores.
They suggest writing out details of your “fantasy” Christmas, then determining which details are most satisfying and feasible.
It might not be too late to try some of those stress-relievers this season. Or consider it practice for next December.
Or, if all else fails, place the family Bible on your lap and slowly digest the first two chapters in the Gospel of Luke. And be thankful that at least one time, somebody recognized that it was more blessed to give than receive.
Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s columnist. His e-mail is koakes@sunjournal.com.
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