What Christmas Means to Me

Note: Most of my blogging lately has been at my family website: parkspages.com


Looking through the lens of my new secular viewpoint, I stopped to think about the meaning of the holidays -- why should I continue to celebrate them? What do they actually mean to me?

The winter holidays are a celebration of death and of life, of ending and of beginning, and ultimately, of hope.

Winter is a time when snow blankets the life of the land, when only pine and fir trees show the promise of spring in their enduring green. The end of the year is near, all is quiet. Winter is a time of waiting.

We wait for spring, for the earth to renew itself, for plants to bud, for the world to grow green with new life.

This is why the peoples of old celebrated it. Winter is a time of hardship, of scarcity, but the coming sun, the coming growth, the coming rebirth holds hope for us, hope for plenty, for a better life.

This is likely why winter was chosen for Jesus' birthdate. The Christ child holds the same hope -- hope that we can be redeemed, that we can be forgiven for our past mistakes and wrongdoing. That we can start anew with the world, and be better people, cleared of past sin.

The holidays to me are a chance to reaffirm the bonds of family and friendship, to meditate on the hope that the world will be better in the coming year. We hope that we will be washed clean from the travails of the previous year in preparation for a better one.

We show our dedication to this goodness through the giving of gifts, the sharing of song, of wine, of warmth and good food. We try to touch all those that are far away, that we haven't contacted in a while.

Hope. A time of reaffirming our dedication to a better world, to being better people. That's what Christmas means to me.