Merry Winter Solstice

Christmas is one of those times when the contents of the American melting pot break down, and all the WASP ingredients come bubbling up to the surface. Suddenly the whole country, except perhaps for certain parts of Brooklyn, turns into a huge Episcopalian Sunday School. When that great leveler, the Christmas spirit, begins to descend--usually about two weeks before Thanksgiving--you realize just how futile the separation of church and state really is.

Certain Scrooges will always insist on staying aloof from all the holiday cheer. They will turn up their noses at the crass commercialism of it all, or they'll point an accusing finger at the jump in the suicide rate during the Christmas season. But perhaps the most pervasive, if not the most pernicious, effect of Christmas is the identity crisis it can cause among kids who are not white or Anglo-Saxon or Protestant. Little black kids find themselves on the knee of a big fat white man with a bushy white beard. And little Jewish kids mut live with the suspicion, even while they are trimming a tree or opening a Christmas present, that somewhere in this story of brotherly love there's a villain, and it appears to be themselves.

As a Jewish kid growing up in a heavily WASP milieu, I always had a stormy love-hate relationship with Christmas. I had a passion for all the romantic trappings--the wreaths and the holly and the trees and the tinsel--but somehow I could never let myself go completely. When I was seven or so, I fixated on the idea of a tree, tall and green and smelling of pine forests. I nagged my mother about it so much that she finally went out and bought me something that was two feet high and silver and smelled of plastic. Somehow that fake tree symbolized the only kind of Christmas I was ever going to be allowed to have--second-class and phony and hypocritical. It served me right for trying to be something I wasn't.

But on the other hand, I wasn't Jewish enough to be able to give up Christmas altogether, like some kids knew. There was one girl at the private school I went to who came from a fairly religious Jewish family. She had a special dispensation to skip the Christmas pageant, and while the rest of the school rehearsed Christmas carols she would sit there silently, looking solemn and self-righteous. In a way, I suppose, her aloofness was a tacit accusation against the rest of us for participating--the school was about 10 per cent Jewish. But she never made me feel guilty. All I felt was pity for her, because she was missing out on music that, whatever the lyrics meant, was some of the most beautiful I had ever heard.

I tried the Chanukah route for a while, but I always knew it was a made-up holiday, invented by anxious Jewish parents to mollify their Christmas-hungry offspring. "Look," they were saying, "you don't need any stockings hung by the chimney with care, or presents under the tree. We're gonna give you eight--yes, count'em, eight--different gifts, one for each day of our holiday." It didn't help, of course, that my parents were not big gift-givers. The only thing I remember getting for Chanukah was a picture book about the Feast of Lights, as it was called. I read the book at least eight times, but somehow-it didn't quite do the trick.

But my parents did, inadvertently, help me find my own solution to the Christmas dilemma one year when I was about 14. Their names used to turn up on every crackpot mailing list in the country, and consequently we would get a constant barrage of all sorts of propaganda. One of our most frequent correspondents was a woman named Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the self-appointed apostle of American atheists. The way she handled Christmas was not to fight it, but to join it. Christmas, she announced in a brochure that appeared in our mailbox one day in early December, was not in fact a Christian holiday at all. Its origins lay in the ancient pagan celebration of the winter solstice. And for just a few dollars, you could buy some lovely winter solstice cards to send to all your friends and let them know just what it was they were really celebrating.

I was amazed. If all this were true, here at last was a way for me to let myself go at Christmas with a clear conscience. But I had to know more. After checking with my mother to make sure that old Madalyn hadn't just pulled this winter solstice stuff out of her hat, I rushed down to the library to do more research. There I found more information on the origins of the Christmas celebration than I had ever dreamed existed. Books on the legend of Santa Claus. Discussions of the rise of the Christmas tree. I took copious notes.

My next step was to buy a sheaf of green construction paper and some red typewriter ribbon. I took a piece of paper out for each of my friends and typed a long, single-spaced dissertation on the history of the winter solstice celebration, also known as Christmas. Then I folded the construction paper carefully in half and stenciled winter solstice trees on all the covers. The whole operation took until about three in the morning.

The next day--the last day of school before Christmas vacation--when everyone else was busily exchanging Christmas cards, I proudly distributed my winter solstice creations. My friends treated them with the same bemused tolerance they reserved for all my eccentricities. I doubt they read them all the way through. But I didn't really care what they thought, because I knew I had finally figured out a way to beat Christmas.