Christmas 2014

So it turns out there's a lot of decorating I can do around the house that will help me celebrate Winter Solstice: lights and wreaths are likely the way I'll go.  And if you start counting from the day of Winter Solstice (Dec. 21), then there are 12 days from there to New Year's Day, so maybe I'll do something to incorporate a variation of "The 12 Days of Christmas" into wintery festive celebrations.  I've found a few books at the library about the history of solstice/equinox celebrations and I'll see which books are good and recommendable.  I started thinking about solstice celebrations too late this year and we weren't even home for it, so perhaps next year I'll decorate for winter.

This year we went down to my parents' house in California.  Here are some pictures of our time in The Golden State:

A place near San Jose called Happy Hollow.  Baby Girl was just tall enough to be able to ride the little roller coaster by herself and Little One was just tall enough to ride at all.

 Face paint at Happy Hollow.  She wanted to be a brown dragon.

We showed him the options and he kept saying "buh-fwy", so we gave him a butterfly (they called it a moth, but it's a butterfly).  ;)

Christmas presents.  We got her "The Rescuers" and "The Rescuers Down Under" which she's never seen before but I liked them a lot as a kid and so I think she might, too.

Mc recording the opening of the presents.  Little One is there on the left; he opened that from us first and he didn't care what else was going on around him for about 15 minutes.

My sisters and me.

Four-generation picture.  All of us are firstborns in our families, too.

My little family.  Baby Girl sure is silly during pictures!

Playing the "Sorry" board game and visiting.  My parents, Baby Girl, her little cousin, and my sister and her fiance.

The sunrise on our way back home; the horizon was RED and I think that's Sacramento below us.  It was neat to see.

All in all, our time there was nice.  We would have done more things, but Mc was sick the whole time and the kids were under the weather for a few days, too; for once I was the healthy one!  The kids are better now, and Mc is about 85% healthy.  We still enjoyed seeing most of my siblings and their families, and hopefully sometime soon we can have a family reunion or something where all of us can be there.

What to Do About Christmas?

I don't know what to do about Christmas this year.

I've never been into buying or receiving gifts; of the 5 "love languages", Gifts is 4th down on the list.  Gifts aren't very important to me, so buying gift for others during this time of year just feels like giving in to the consumerism of Christmas.

When we were first married, Mc and I found a way to make the holiday season more about Christ.  We don't have a Christmas tree, we have a nativity set that we set up and then put the Christmas presents under it.  We limited the number of gifts that we give our children to three each to symbolize the three gifts Jesus got from the wise men.  And we are going to teach our kids that the story of Santa isn't real, and we'll teach them where that tradition came from and why so many people like it.

But this is the first Christmas season where I'm no longer a Christian and I'm not even a theist, and so the Jesus part of Christmas doesn't resonate with me anymore.  I respect that it's important for a lot of people, and Mc is still a Christian, but the Christmas season no longer has a personal meaning for me.  And yet I certainly won't go the secular route and have Christmas be all about Santa and reindeer and jingle bells, because I've never liked that stuff to begin with.  So I'm wondering what I could do during this time of year that has some meaning for me.

I'm playing around with the idea of celebrating winter solstice somehow.  Winter solstice marks the darkest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, and every day after that gets lighter for longer until it peaks at the summer solstice, and many cultures around the world used to celebrate the winter solstice to mark the start of lighter days to come.  That's how Christmas came about anyway: Christians sought to replace the "pagan" winter solstice celebrations with Christian ones, and since they believed Jesus was the light of the world, they decided his birthday should take the place of the winter solstice celebrations (some pre-Christian solstice traditions have survived throughout the years, like the Yule log).

With a little bit of research and creativity I think I can find a way to make this December season meaningful to me, either by doing something separate or by combining it with Christmas somehow.  Just something lighthearted and fun.  Mc and I will talk about what we want to do as a family to incorporate my current beliefs with his, if anything.  Mc still gets time off of work around this time and we get to visit out-of-state family, and that's still going to be nice.