The Folly of Christmas

OR: your humble investigator tries to find the meaning of this weird December holiday

Christmas Service by Thomas Kinkade

Every year the city of Waterloo puts on a “WONDERS OF WINTER” light show in its creatively named Waterloo park. Teams of volunteers from all over the city spend weeks putting up, according to their website, “over 150 colourful displays with over 150,000 lights”. I walked over the other night to investigate.

The first light displays you see are classic and Christmas-themed. Santa and reindeer hitched to a sleigh, snowmen and Christmas trees and gingerbread men doing cartwheels and even Charlie Brown looking apathetic and impotent and frustrated with Snoopy asleep on his dog house. Then, there are more winter-themed ones, like polar bears and swans and reindeer, snowflakes, alpine skiers and ice skaters. But then, gradually, almost imperceptible if it wasn’t so obvious, it starts to get weird. Batman and Wonder Woman, race cars and Thomas the tank engine, a carousel, five flashing t-rex in lurid purples, reds, and yellows, an eight foot tall stegosaurus eating green leaves off the top of a palm tree, an anthropomorphized donut, a life-size ambulance with flames in the windows that’s running at you head on, a blue monkey-dog-like creature with an orange sombrero carrying two suitcases, which still vaguely haunts me. Apparently light alone isn’t enough because almost every single display flashes violently in varied staccato bursts, enough to keep any epileptic far away. And crappy Christmas pop floats through the park grounds, giving off what I can only call abandoned amusement park energy.

People ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and point and stop at literally every single display to take a photo of it on their smartphone, for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on¹. Your investigator mainly notices because, despite being so engrossed in his own inner commentary, he has to weave around them when they stop in the middle of the path like pylons. Of course, each light display is sponsored by an advertiser, local businesses like Swan Dust Control and Morty’s Pub, national brands like Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire, law firms and realtors and whatever HelloMortgages.ca is (their website is mostly unclear) as well as esoteric community organizations who strangely have the budget and motivation to advertise like the Optimist Club of Lakeshore Village. All have put up big black and white back-lit signs that make no mistake to let you know just who sponsored it. Some of the light displays, in fact, are lazy and desperate enough to just be advertisements themselves. The Tim Hortons light display is just two weird glowy timbits, like space orbs, with ice skates on.

At the central barn, there are big posters on stands with squares where you can tap your credit card to donate in convenient increments of $5, $10, and $20. Near the exit, underneath the words “Merry Christmas,” made out in soft red lights, are several aggressively black laminate signs with big block highlighter orange text in all lowercase, failing to show the faintest attempt at grammar, saying brilliant and well thought out things like “475+ businesses waiting for you,” or “80 bars + restaurants 24 clothing stores 31 salons & spas and so much more!” or, succinctly, “everyone’s uptown”.

I couldn’t tell if this whole thing was cool or creative or capitalistic or just plain confused.

I turned around to go home, walking the outer edge of park, starting to string together all the sentences in my head that you just read, quite against my own will, keenly aware that I seem to be the kind of person that has to turn a evening walk through a fun, family-oriented, holiday-themed attraction that people worked hard to set up, into a cultural commentary about our materialism and surface dwelling and deteriorating values and how everything is a mirror, instead of just, as the mildly blasphemous voice in my head puts it, “enjoying the goddam lights”.

But, before I left, I passed a small shed tucked off to the side, dilapidated with age, peeling black shingles and old wooden boards, with warm yellow light spilling out of the front, pooling on the snow. Above was painted, “NATIVITY”. Inside the display were loose bits of hay and a collection of wooden figures, maybe fifteen in total. All about two feet tall and uncomfortably gaunt, hand-carved out of maple with solid walnut stands underneath, showing a varnish that seems to indicate age. Figures that would have taken an ungodly amount of time to make. There are eight lambs in different postures and positions, a donkey and a cow, two camels made of darker wood with their necks rearing, tongues flaring wildly out of their mouths (classic camel activity). Then, closer to the center, three shepherds, one with a sheep splayed out across his back in a kind of fireman’s carry, three wise men with rich robes and opulent, bejewelled crowns, then a careworn-looking man in rags standing behind a young woman kneeling, hands clasped in prayer, radiating piety and peace. And everyone’s eyes are transfixed on this small baby, lying belly up in a manger.

A few thoughts come into my head at this point. One is the historical inaccuracy of the scene, since Jesus, in all likelihood, was born in a cave. It also hits me that although the light show is packed, no one else is around. The nativity is tolerated as a relic but shoved off to the outside edge of the park, the part everyone walks by, when, if it wasn’t for this scene, at least the long-held belief this scene occurred and mattered, the light show wouldn’t even be there. I would call it irony but it’s something deeper and far more sad. And lastly, how preachy and presumptuous and annoying it will sound to try to talk about any of this in a way that is human and real.

This December I haven’t been blue exactly, but I have been feeling a few shades of gray. I haven’t been experiencing the festive gaiety and cheer that is stored up in November to be all spent in December because everyone north of the Mason-Dixon knows January to March are the dog-days of winter. Maybe it’s because I have two securities exams to write this week, maybe because snow keeps sailing down from the sky as a reminder of nature’s beauty and brutal indifference, maybe because I was politely side-stepped by a girl I liked, maybe because I’m immature enough to include that last line instead of pretending I’m cool and indifferent which is apparently more attractive, the temptation of art superseding almost all of my better judgment, or maybe it’s just the general busy bustling haze of day to day adult existence.

Last week I went into a shopping mall for the first time in four or five years, and the whole affair was a real wrist-slitter. Right inside the doors were big posted signs for a ‘Sensory-Friendly Santa Experience,’ and overplayed Christmas pop was piped through the loudspeakers and white high-powered LED pot lights beamed down like UFOs and every store and kiosk seemed obscenely bright and garish and fake with big signs saying things like, ‘Crave more’ or, ‘Happiness is a new pair of glasses’ or, my definite favourite, a coffee store with a big banner in self-serious serif, ‘Time to wake up’. And I couldn’t help but hear the voice of the understory in my ear saying, in its comically insistent tone, “Buy. Buy something. Did you buy something yet? Quick. Hurry. Don’t think. Come on, buy something already. Do it.²”

I hear complaints about how Christmas has gone capitalist and commercial and is stressful and demanding and expensive. And it is all those things. But that is only because we have torn out the underpinnings of the whole holiday from something numinous to something unnatural. You overspend when you lack values. You feel pressure to have the perfect day when you think that’s what the whole integrity of the holiday hinges on. Something you can do. Not something that has been done for you.

Or, for those who don’t get vertigo from the high expectations around the holiday, Christmas is shrunk down to an insignificant size, a mildly unordinary day. But a life stripped of genuine celebration seems, to me, inhuman.

But that isn’t the strangest part. The strangest part is that people still celebrate Christmas without believing any of it or caring to think why it exists and what exactly they’re doing when they celebrate it. That even people who disbelieve in the very origins of the holiday with a certain sense of pride, still drag a douglas fir into the middle of their living room and string lights around it and put boxes wrapped in fancy paper underneath and act like it’s all normal and completely compatible with their belief system. And the capitalist monster has sunk its hooks so deep into that single dedicated day in December that wanting and buying have become virtually indistinguishable from the holiday itself.

I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I just think it’s a little weird, when you think about it, what exactly we’re up to. I just think it shouldn’t be a surprise that if the current culture celebrates Christmas on borrowed and confused beliefs, the whole ordeal begins to feel borrowed and confused. Like it’s missing something.

The only evidence of the nativity scene I could find on the “WONDERS OF WINTER” website was a two-second pan shot of a grainy, awkward, side-angled photo with the words “Experience Christmas” flashed underneath, from their iMovie edited promo video set to an upbeat electric guitar version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”³.

Once you rip the religion out of Christmas, all you’re left with is a couple of extra days off work to eat too much and buy things for people and have people buy things for you and open things that you told people to buy for you and even sent them the URL so they don’t waste their money or don’t have to go back and return it, pretending to be surprised and delighted and enamoured with your new thing, forced to spend time with family you may or may not want to be around. There’s nothing solid and enduring to celebrate. If you are celebrating, it’s something like simple like quality time or something carnal like pleasure. Raw indulgence.

I can hardly remember what I got for Christmas last year⁴. And I remember everything.

In this secularized and sanitized rendition, Christmas becomes about the movement of money rather than the recognition of a miracle, about economic development rather than a witness to a light entering a dark world, a kind of pharmaceutical that momentarily speeds up the circulation of capital. I’m not commenting on what is or isn’t true. I’m just stating what is, if you really think about it.

And I should be studying for my securities exams or shovelling or gathering my courage but instead I’m sitting up at 10:30PM, well past my bedtime, listening to the cackling laugher from my roommate’s Christmas party going on in the living room, feeling like a fitting soundtrack to this whole charade, not editing sentences that don’t make perfect sense because the energy is there, because that’s how I first wrote it down before censoring myself, because this essay had to come out of me.

That night I stood there at the nativity, alone, shivering, feeling the sharp, cold air in my nose almost as a solid object, for a good thirty minutes. Staring. Waiting. Snow sailing down silently in large flakes, melting on the wet pavement. An old version of Silent Night crackling timidly from a small tin speaker into the darkness, sung by a woman who’s probably long dead. At one point, a small crowd gathered around, probably seeing someone look at something and figuring it must be cool, but dispersed when they realized it was just a nativity scene, not even worth taking a photo of with their smartphone. I stood there, in the wind and the cold, studying the faces of each figure, how the golden light pooled on the polished wood, picturing the fellow carving each piece, probably also long dead, imagining the amount of time it would have taken to chisel out every facial feature, as if he had something important to communicate, as if he was trying to reach me through the grave. Standing. Staring. Waiting for joy to strike me, for a familiar but forgotten peace to resound, a reminder of what this season is all about, refusing to budge until a light broke through the grayness. And then it did.

Walk where the light is,

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works in progress

1. I have a theory that people’s need to capture everything—seen especially in any tourist destination, museum, summer fair or winter light show—is an offshoot of a deep and enduring fear of transience, which is really a fear of mortality, as if a photo will let you hold on to something longer. More specifically, the fear of losing continuity of memory, a future self, somewhere from which to remember. (Once you get into the domain of sharing photos, the mechanics change considerably and it becomes more an offshoot of our need to have a certain image of ourselves in the minds of others, be seen and thought about a certain way).

2. I don’t want to degrade or discard or discredit the miracle of capitalism, how objectively worse it was even a hundred years ago to get basic necessities. But, if you think about it, it’s a strange way to spend your time: walking around in brightly lit unfamiliar rooms, staring at objects made overseas you could or couldn’t buy and probably don’t need, playing into the illusion that it might finally complete you, the illusion that’s been shattered so many times it’s practically dust, then walking out.

3. I can’t help but notice the verbiage around Christmas has settled affirmatively around “Experience,” as if it’s a transaction, something to serve you.

4. What I do remember, however, was wading through two feet of snow across an old farmer’s field with my family to explore an old abandoned barn, hay still strewn in the stables, still smelling of cow, gawking up at the hewn cross beams as big as trees. the post and beam timber framing, picturing the men planing those beams, the barn-raising party that would have happened in that very spot.