christmas
Everyone has different traditions and activities so here is how my family does Christmas, alongside my thoughts. I also want to preface this post with it being entirely a rant and my own opinions/perspectives since I know I’m extremely privileged and grateful to be able to even have the luxury to relax during the holidays.
Looking back, I can only recall my family decorating and putting up a Christmas tree three times, all occurrences before entering middle school. There were probably a few more instances of the tree being put up when I was really little but I don’t really remember those times. My family isn’t Christian but Christmas is such a global holiday that most people celebrate it, especially given its presence in various media forms (ex: books, movies, shows, etc).
So, why doesn’t my family celebrate Christmas?
I think the main reason is because my parents never celebrated it growing up either. Since they immigrated to America during their teenage years, they didn’t get much exposure to those festivities while trying to make ends meet.
Once they got older and learned more about the culture, they tried integrating aspects of it when raising my siblings and I by mainly putting up a Christmas tree. Since we infrequently put up the Christmas tree, I literally only remember decorating it three times and always getting excited to see the darkness being illuminated by the tree’s lights — it made me feel comfy and I just liked being near the tree. Personally, I think that this doesn’t reinforce the main takeaways of Christmas such as being able to spend time with family and learning how to be selfless.
As a child, I remember only thinking about what presents I would get. I would only get one gift from my parents and they always prefaced it with “you can choose whatever you want as long as it’s not too expensive”. With that reasoning, I never believed in Santa Claus because my parents never did activities such as snowy footprints to pretend that Santa dropped off presents under our tree. My house also doesn’t have a chimney so… there’s that haha
As a teenager, Christmas still revolved around presents. My family is disjoint from both sides of the family so we never had a lot of presents in the first place or family gatherings, usually just presents from my parents and our cousins that are close in age. However, my parents started a newer tradition of going to Lake Tahoe with our cousins during winter break since we had all never been before. This allowed us to have more family time and therefore marked the end of us putting up the Christmas tree since we had stopped for a couple of years. Going to Lake Tahoe is always special to me because it’s the only vacation that my family goes on since we don’t travel much. I remember always being excited the night before leaving and being in awe when seeing snow.
With the pandemic occurring and college applications rolling around in 2019, my family stopped going to Tahoe. Winter break became a time for me to initially rest, then grind during high school and college.
Especially with extended family arguments, Christmas is just an ordinary day during winter break for my family and I. There is no Christmas tree, Christmas presents, Tahoe trip, or family gatherings. Whenever I receive text messages from friends wishing me “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year”, it always makes me feel weird (in some sense) since my family doesn’t celebrate those holidays.
As I’ve grown older, presents hold less value and seeing various traditions on social media sometimes made me a bit envious of how close people are to their family and friends. Children experiencing the magic of Christmas is an event that can only happen once in a lifetime before it gets ruined. Even playing silly holiday games or participating in White Elephant seems so fun. Perhaps my siblings and I can be the change once we’re older and establish new traditions.
My dad denoted this Christmas as the “worst Christmas ever” because my grandma suffered from a stroke a few days prior, causing her to be hospitalized for three weeks as of this post. Spending Christmas and in general, a lot of time at the hospital was a very impactful experience for me and allowed me to truly reflect about the time we have alive. It made me feel so sad to see patients helpless, trying their best to get healthy. Additionally, hospital workers have to deal with so much emotional baggage with each patient they interact with. I’m not going to go more into specifics but overall, the most important thing is cherishing and spending time with people you love because nothing lasts forever.