My family’s Christmas Eve celebration is one of my favorite parts of the year. The extended family gathers. We have a big feast. Then 20+ people huddle up and sing songs and tell stories for hours. I don’t believe in the literal messages of these rituals, but they have a power to them that I rarely see outside of religious-inspired works of art. They feel timeless and magical even though most Christmas carols have only existed for 50 years or so. The repetition of them each year grants them ritual strength. And the closeness I feel with my family grants them warmth.
Together, all these things are precious.
I didn’t realize how precious, though, until the year I invited a friend of mine to the Christmas Eve party. Her first reaction amused me: “Wait, you guys literally sit around a fire and sing Christmas carols? Like, in movies?” Her second reaction, as the night ended, was even more amusing: “Oh my god, I had no idea Christmas could be so awesome!” But I knew what she meant, and it was accompanied with the realization that NOT everybody got to have experiences like this.
And that made Christmas Eve all the more special. It also made me realize how ridiculous it is that I only get to have that experience once a year.
That desire nagged at me a few years, and it was accompanied by another nagging dissatisfaction: That I didn’t really believe in the words of the songs. They had power, generated by the magnitude of the songwriter’s belief, and given lyric form by carefully honed skill. But they weren’t true, and the falsehood itched at the back of my mind. Not because of the songs themselves, but because there weren’t other songs, equally beautiful and with the same cultural weight, that were about things that I truly believed in.
Christmas has a lot of nice things (presents, decorations, etc), many of which pre-date Christian influence. But one of the things that was specifically nice to me about “small Christmas” was that it did have a ritual arc, which included bits that had memetic depth. I just… wanted to have that, but with memetic depth that I actually endorsed.
Relevant quote from the original NYC Ritual Report:
Christmas has a lot of nice things (presents, decorations, etc), many of which pre-date Christian influence. But one of the things that was specifically nice to me about “small Christmas” was that it did have a ritual arc, which included bits that had memetic depth. I just… wanted to have that, but with memetic depth that I actually endorsed.